In Oklahoma, one out of every six residents is poor. One in five children lives in poverty and faces food insecurity. In Hungry Oklahoma, native son and sociologist Robert Lee Maril follows in the tradition of the national bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Evicted to illuminate the lived experience of poverty and food insecurity in communities across the state.Maril’s account is immediately personal. He begins with “guests,” as shoppers are called by volun...

To the American public it’s a 2,000-mile-long project to keep illegal immigrants, narcotics, and terrorists on the other side of the U.S.–Mexico border. In the deserts of Arizona, it’s a “virtual fence” of high-tech electronic sensors, cameras, and radar. In some border stretches it’s a huge concrete-and-steel wall; in others it’s a series of solitary posts designed to stop drug runners; in still others it’s rusted barbed-wire cattle fences. For two-thirds of the international boundary it’...