Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged American Dream

Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home

I’m sharing this book with everyone I know. Caitlin Shetterly’s Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home is a strong memoir about a young couple going broke in the recession and it gives readers the satisfying feeling of walking around someone else’s shoes for 250 pages. We’re all connected by some basic humanity and a good memoir reinforces this connection as we don the cloak of another with ease.

Take It From Me

Take It From Me makes an emotional statement even more than a political one. This documentary film chronicles the time period after the passing of the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act, which placed a five-year limit on public assistance. Emily Abt, the producer and director, is a former social caseworker in New York City. She offers us the daily lives of four women who are struggling against great odds to raise themselves and their children up out of poverty.

Trailer Girl: And Other Stories

One of my favorite short story collections of all time is Black Tickets, a masterpiece written by Jayne Anne Phillips in the 1970s. So hauntingly poetic and impressive were these stories written about rootless misfits by a young and relatively unknown writer that a giant of the short story genre, Raymond Carver, contributed a blurb to the book’s back cover. He wrote: “These stories of America’s disenfranchised are unlike any in our literature.