One of TIME’s Best New Books to Read This Summer

“Brilliant—a keen, elegantly written, and scorching account of the American family today. Through vivid stories, sharp analysis and wit, Quart anatomizes the middle class’s fall while also offering solutions and hope.” 
   — Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed

Families today are

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Documentary traces the worldwide economic collapse to a 1971 secret memo entitled Attack on American Free Enterprise System. Written over 40 years ago by the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, at the behest of the US Chamber of Commerce, the 6-page memo, a free-market utopian treatise, called for a money fueled big business makeover of government through corporate control of media, academia, pulpit, arts and sciences and destruction of organized...

"In a searing indictment of America's decline, former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert profiles struggling Americans--casualties of decades of government policies that have produced underemployment, inequality, and pointless wars--and offers a ringing call to arms to restore justice and the American dream. The United States needs to be reimagined. Once described by Lincoln as the last best hope on earth, the country seemed on the verge of fulfilling...

"America is becoming a class-based society. It is now conventional wisdom to focus on the wealth of the top 1 percent-especially the top 0.01 percent-and how the ultra-rich are concentrating income and prosperity while incomes for most other Americans are stagnant. But the most important, consequential, and widening gap in American society is between the upper middle class and everyone else. Reeves defines the upper middle class as those whose incomes...