"The Injustice of Place" by Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer and Timothy J. Nelson

In turning their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places, the authors of "The Injustice of Place" discovered that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice but rural areas that are often ignored.Kathryn Edin and Tim Nelson, both of Princeton University, noted that, along with Luke Shaefer, who co-authored a previous book on poverty with Edin, set off on a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas to better understand the poverty that exists in those places. What they found, the pair told Steve Tarter is that these poverty-stricken areas were rung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials. Areas home to desperate poverty were also places that bore witness to considerable wealth. Edin recalled that a Mississippi politician told them that he wished that instead of setting up segregation academies, whites in the area would have gone to school with black neighbors. If they had, things would have been different, he suggested.In regards to education in America: "We've got to face the fact that we're as segregated as we were prior to the (Supreme Court's)  Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954."Edin added that people returning to some of the poor communities are now seeking changes in order to make things more equitable.