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Published Apr 2020
352 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
From award-winning journalist Lauren Sandler, a poignant and gripping immersion in the life of a young, homeless single mother amid her quest to find stability and shelter in the richest city in America.
Camila is twenty-two years old and a new mother. She has no family to rely on, no partner, and no home. Despite her intelligence and determination, the odds are firmly stacked against her. In this extraordinary work of literary reportage, Lauren Sandler chronicles a year in Camila's life—from the birth of her son to his first birthday—as she navigates the labyrinth of poverty and homelessness in New York City. In her attempts to secure a safe place to raise her son and find a measure of freedom in her life, Camila copes with dashed dreams, failed relationships, the desolation of abandonment, and miles of red tape with grit, humor, and uncanny resilience.
Every day, more than forty-five million Americans attempt to survive below the poverty line. Every night, nearly sixty thousand people sleep in New York City-run shelters, 40 percent of them children. In This Is All I Got, Sandler brings this deeply personal issue to life, vividly depicting one woman's hope and despair and her steadfast determination to change her life despite the myriad setbacks she encounters.
This Is All I Got is a rare feat of reporting and a dramatic story of survival. Sandler's candid and revealing account also exposes the murky boundaries between a journalist and her subject when it becomes impossible to remain a dispassionate observer. She has written a powerful and unforgettable indictment of a system that is often indifferent to the needs of those it serves, and that sometimes seems designed to fail.
"Sandler displays her journalistic talent by unerringly presenting this dire situation: the vanishing safety net, the stubbornness of entrenched racism, and the snowballing burdens of poor women...An impressive blend of dispassionate reporting, pungent condemnation of public welfare, and gritty humanity." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] vivid, heartbreaking account... Sandler reveals the devastating consequences of America's weakening social safety net and widening wealth gap. Readers will be moved by this harrowing and impassioned call for change." - Publishers Weekly
"Too few journalists put the time in to allow the working poor and homeless to be heard, speaking clearly about their pitfalls and occasional triumphs, in their own words. Sandler has achieved this with skill." - Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
"By writing the intimate story of a woman alone making a life for herself and her baby, Lauren Sandler has brilliantly written the story of America in the age of inequality. Read this book, please—it is as gripping as it is moving as it is important." - Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation
"Meticulously crafted and brilliantly reported, Lauren Sandler's This Is All I Got exposes the Kafkaesque cruelties of America's disintegrating social safety net. It is a gut punch of a narrative, an electrifying summons to policy action, and an instant classic." - Dan-el Padilla Peralta, associate professor of classics, Princeton, and author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League
This information about This Is All I Got was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist. She is the bestselling author of One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One and Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement. Her essays and features have appeared in dozens of publications, including Time, the New York Times, Slate, the Atlantic, the Nation, the New Republic, the Guardian, and New York. Sandler has led the OpEd Project's Public Voices Fellowships at Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth and has taught in the graduate journalism program at New York University, where she has also been a visiting scholar. Recently, she has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale and a Calderwood Fellow at MacDowell. She lives in Brooklyn.
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