Growing Up Empty

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.