Chicago's Southwest Side is one of the last remaining footholds for the city's white working class, a little-studied and little-understood segment of the American population. This book paints a nuanced and complex portrait of the firefighters, police officers, stay-at-home mothers, and office workers living in the stable working-class community known as Beltway. Building on the classic Chicago School of urban studies and incorporating new perspectives from cultural geography and sociology, Maria Kefalas considers the significance of home, community, and nation for Beltway residents.

Working-Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood

History

Kefalas, Maria

Americas

University of California Press

Coming of Age in America: The Transition to Adulthood in the Twenty-First Century

What is it like to become an adult in twenty-first-century America? This book takes us to four very different places―New York City, San Diego, rural Iowa, and Saint Paul, Minnesota―to explore the dramatic shifts in coming-of-age experiences across the country. Drawing from in-depth interviews with people in their twenties and early thirties, it probes experiences and decisions surrounding education, work, marriage, parenthood, and housing. The first study to systematically explore this phenomenon from a qualitative perspective, Coming of Age in America offers a clear view of how traditional patterns and expectations are changing, of the range of forces that are shaping these changes, and of how young people themselves view their lives.

Waters, Mary C.

Carr, Patrick Joseph

Holdaway, Jennifer Ann

Millie Acevedo bore her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of them? Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, with a New Preface

Edin, Kathryn

Reference

Leukodystrophy is a life-limiting neurological disorder that can affect both children and adults. 
In an illustrated story based on her conversations with her children after their sister, Cal, was diagnosed with leukodystrophy, Maria Kefalas delivers a simple and powerful explanation from a child's point of view that explains the workings of the brain, what a diagnosis means, and how to face the challenge as a family. 
"This is a beautiful book that delivers a powerfully simple, no nonsense explanation of leukodystrophy ... it reminds us that every single child needs and responds to our love and kindness." 
-Rebecca Brenner, former teacher

Loie's Disease: A Book About Leukodystrophy

Children's Books

Archway Pub

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