Recommended: Heartland

Sarah Smarsh's 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is a book everyone ought to read. The author grew up poor on a wheat farm in Kansas, but managed to become a tenured professor. Her insights into the lives of the underclass in America, and how the system - created by people who have no concept of the needs  of the people they think they are helping, and who often, frankly, don't care about them - are searing.