Growing Up Empty

by Schwartz-Nobel, Loretta

• ISBN13: 9780060954864
• ISBN10: 0060954868
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-24
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Growing Up Empty is a study of the hidden hunger epidemic that still remains largely unacknowledged at the highest political levels and "an unforgettable exploration of public policy, its failures and its victims" (William Raspberry, Washington Post). Twenty years after Ronald Reagan declared that hunger was no longer an American problem, Schwartz-Nobel shows that hunger has reached epic proportions, running rampant through urban, rural, and suburban communities, affecting blacks, whites, Asians, Christians and Jews, and nonbelievers alike. Among the people we come to know are the new homeless. Born of the "Welfare to Work" program, these working poor have jobs but do not make enough to support their families, such as the formerly middle-class housewife reduced to stealing in order to feed her children, or the soldier fighting on our front lines while his young wife stands in bread lines and is denied benefits and baby formula at a military health clinic. With skillful investigative reporting and a novelist's humanitarian eye for detail, Schwartz-Nobel portrays a haunting reality of human suffering that need not exist. A call to action, Growing Up Empty is advocacy journalism at its best.

Table of Contents

Author's Note	xiii
Preface	1	(20)
Introduction	21	(14)
Hunger and the Middle Class	35	(20)
Divorce and the Downward Spiral
Hunger and the Always Poor	55	(28)
Generation after Generation of Urban and Rural Poverty
Hunger and the Military	83	(36)
From Front Lines to Food Lines
Hunger and the Working Poor	119	(30)
Long Hours, Starvation Wages
Hunger and the Homeless	149	(38)
America's Wandering Families
Hunger, the Immigrants and the Refugees	187	(30)
Dreams of the Dispossessed
A Story without an End	217	(16)
The Ghosts of Yesterday
The Last Word	233	(6)
Appendixes	239	(10)
A. The Medford Declaration
B. Organizations
Notes	249