If you've ever seen a story about food stamps or poverty and wondered how people end up there, you need to read Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. Author Linda Tirado wrote a post about why the poor make such “terrible decisions,” it went viral, and she offers an expanded take on the subject here.

As more people fall through the “spongy divide” between just making it and too broke to function—and at last count that was roughly a third of the U.S. population—Tirado writes in the hope that we'll understand one another better. Specifically, she hopes those who use the services and reap the benefits of subsistence labor (and if you eat food, shop or pretty much ever leave the house, this is you) will acknowledge that it's necessary work, but grossly underpaid and routinely devalued.

Tirado's writing is gritty, profane and to the point. She nails the sense of exhaustion you feel while toggling between two or three jobs with little to no rest in sight, the staggering insult of being accused of meth use because lack of access to dentistry means your teeth fall apart over time, and the perpetual sense of hives-like itchiness that comes with wearing second-hand clothes. And she offers a succinct explanation for the situational depression that service workers often experience while trying to balance back-breaking labor with the soul-crushing imperative to be all things to all customers: “(W)e're trying to zombie out to survive.”

This is dark material, to be sure, but Tirado is fierce and funny in equal measure. Lest you think she's describing a phenomenon that doesn't touch you or anyone you know, the examples I chose for this review are ones I've also experienced firsthand. There are more of us living Hand to Mouth than you realize, and thankfully, we finally have a voice.

Multitasking at work through texts and emails, pumping breast milk for your baby, then grabbing a decaf latte solo as a treat afterward: Is this you? It turns out our collective drive for greater efficiency is leading to lower productivity, reduced immunity and general malaise. In The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter, author Susan Pinker (The Sexual Paradox) shares research indicating that face time is the answer to many of our troubles.

When MIT researchers enabled workers to share a 15-minute coffee break, they were surprised: Productivity increased significantly, and the workers reported being happier on the job. This may have been because they could share strategies for dealing with difficult customers, but there's also a less-quantifiable benefit to face time. Breast milk is full of good things for babies, sure, but there's new thinking that one of the benefits of breastfeeding, beyond the contents of the milk, is the physical closeness between mother and child; this form of coddling tends to produce children who are paradoxically more willing to take risks. Similarly, there has yet to be a TV show or computer program that engages children with books the way having a parent read to them from a young age does; what seems like a simple interaction affects much more than you'd think.

Pinker's research takes her to “blue zones” in Sardinia and intentional communities in Northern California. She's thoughtful, humorous and thorough, allowing for the downsides of a trustworthy face (Bernie Madoff had one), while shoring up her argument that finding time to connect on a personal level is more than worth the effort. While The Village Effect is short on ideas to help the disconnected find community, it's nevertheless a thought-provoking introduction to an idea we'll surely be hearing more about.

The “triple package,” as the authors anatomize it, is a cluster of traits that enables groups, individuals and even nations to get ahead materially. Specifically, the three traits are: (1) an innate sense of superiority co-existing simultaneously with (2) feelings of situational insecurity and powered by (3) impulse control so that gains made through concentration, hard work and thrift are not dissipated by transitory urges and appetites.

This “recipe for success” hardly comes as a surprise to most of us. In fact, it seems little more than an update of Ben Franklin’s bootstrapping wisdom. But what the authors add to what we’ve already been told or surmised are study-supported insights into how these traits emerge, change and disappear within populations and what the consequences are.

It bears noting that Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are married to each other, both law professors at Yale and both offspring of ethnic groups that have flourished by activating the triple package. Chua, whose parent were impoverished Chinese immigrants, set talk shows and op-ed pages buzzing in 2011 with her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she argued for a more rigorous and disciplined approach to educating children, offering her own kids as examples. Here, however, Chua and Rubenfeld forswear the first-person approach, electing instead to present more generalized evidence to undergird their conclusions.

In examining how Asians, Jews, Nigerians, Mormons, refugees from Cuba and other sub-groups have risen to the tops of their professions, it would have been easy to simply stereotype. But the authors point out repeatedly that triple-package virtues are not endemic to any particular race or religion nor embraced by all members. Rather, these qualities are inclined to blossom and wither according to external circumstances and tend to weaken or even vanish in succeeding generations. Moreover, they promote “success” only in a narrow, material sense. They don’t promise satisfaction or happiness.

The authors use their last chapter to argue that America has abandoned the triple package formula that once made it the envy of the world. And they blame a number of factors, from the lack of thrift to a mindless embracing of the self-esteem movement that teaches people, especially children, that they have a right to feel good about themselves without having achieved anything by their own efforts.  “With those . . . elements [of insecurity and impulse control] gone,” they lament, “what remained was superiority and the desire to live in the present—a formula not for drive, grit, and innovation, but for instant gratification.” Time will tell if they’re right.

According to author Rosemary Mahoney, “the United States has the lowest rate of blindness in the world,” yet Americans fear blindness more than any other handicap. As she concedes in her riveting glance into the world of the blind, she was among those who palpably feared a world of darkness.

Yet, in her compulsively readable account, For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind, Mahoney reveals that the blind often embrace their affliction rather than wallowing in self-pity or searching for sympathy.

Mahoney (Down the Nile) travels to India to teach in a school for the blind run by Sabriye Tenberken, founder of Braille Without Borders. She admits that she chose the school because she had developed a strong curiosity about blindness and that “she wanted to meet blind people, to spend time with them, to get to know them . . . to see how they live in their world, and how they navigate.”

What she discovers is that the blind don’t let their sightlessness stand in the way of living their lives. Many of the students feel lucky to be blind, because, as they tell her, if “we were not blind, we would still be sitting in our countries only helping at home and doing nothing.” The blind individuals with whom she lives and works are “strong and happy and very capable . . . they’ve accepted their blindness; it can’t stand in their way.”

Mahoney’s beautifully written narrative opens our eyes to the experience of blindness and offers fresh insight into human resilience and the way we view the world.

Do you religiously recycle your stuff, but wonder what happens after the truck carts it away? Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter’s book about the trade in trash and recyclables, looks at how billions of dollars’ worth of usable materials (sometimes tossed after just a single use) gets collected, sorted, baled, sold and shipped off to recyclers, and reveals who is making a living harvesting the materials we pay to part with. He follows the trail all the way to the end, describing the people who pay a high price to pick apart and process (usually with bare hands) the valuable resources locked up in our waste. The book also includes color photographs of working conditions few Americans would tolerate.

Minter is uniquely qualified to write about this industry. He grew up in the family scrap business and now lives in China, where he serves as the Shanghai correspondent for Bloomberg World View. The book is part family history and part travelogue, as he accompanies Chinese scrap dealers crisscrossing the U.S., snapping up shipping containers’ worth of materials, including electronics that are tossed out by the tons every year. He also travels to Asia, where entire regions have dedicated themselves to recycling our scrap. Recycling brings much-needed employment to these often-impoverished areas and demonstrates the resourcefulness of the developing world, whose citizens repurpose, reuse and resell the stuff we consider “trash.” Minter describes these places, transformed from fertile rural backwaters to bustling, polluted urban centers where the labor is unregulated and the materials are toxic.

Adam Minter does not claim to be an environmentalist, and readers of that bent might be offended at his disdain of recycling, especially as practiced by well-to-do and well-meaning suburbanites. He does point out, however, that despite the toxic effects of some overseas materials processing, the developing world is doing what people in America used to do before things got so disposable: They are using brains and initiative to reuse perfectly good stuff. For all our talk about sustainable lifestyles and “going green,” Minter says, the people who buy our leftovers might be teaching us a lesson or two.

Do you religiously recycle your stuff, but wonder what happens after the truck carts it away? Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter’s book about the trade in trash and recyclables, looks at how billions of dollars’ worth of usable materials (sometimes tossed after just a single use) gets collected, sorted, baled, sold and shipped off to recyclers, and reveals who is making a living harvesting the materials we pay to part with. He follows the trail all the way to the end, describing the people who pay a high price to pick apart and process (usually with bare hands) the valuable resources locked up in our waste. The book also includes color photographs of working conditions few Americans would tolerate.

Minter is uniquely qualified to write about this industry. He grew up in the family scrap business and now lives in China, where he serves as the Shanghai correspondent for Bloomberg World View. The book is part family history and part travelogue, as he accompanies Chinese scrap dealers crisscrossing the U.S., snapping up shipping containers’ worth of materials, including electronics that are tossed out by the tons every year. He also travels to Asia, where entire regions have dedicated themselves to recycling our scrap. Recycling brings much-needed employment to these often-impoverished areas and demonstrates the resourcefulness of the developing world, whose citizens repurpose, reuse and resell the stuff we consider “trash.” Minter describes these places, transformed from fertile rural backwaters to bustling, polluted urban centers where the labor is unregulated and the materials are toxic.

Adam Minter does not claim to be an environmentalist, and readers of that bent might be offended at his disdain of recycling, especially as practiced by well-to-do and well-meaning suburbanites. He does point out, however, that despite the toxic effects of some overseas materials processing, the developing world is doing what people in America used to do before things got so disposable: They are using brains and initiative to reuse perfectly good stuff. For all our talk about sustainable lifestyles and “going green,” Minter says, the people who buy our leftovers might be teaching us a lesson or two.

From The Tipping Point (2000) onward, Malcolm Gladwell has made a specialty of gathering commonly accessible facts and viewing them from uncommon—and often surprising—perspectives. In David and Goliath, he seizes on the fable of the title to undergird his thesis that “the powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak.” In his eyes, David had the edge over Goliath from the start, not just because he possessed a superior weapons system—the far-reaching sling vs. the short-range spear and sword—but also because he imposed his own rules of combat instead of conceding to Goliath’s.

Gladwell goes on to argue that conditions first seen as adverse or limiting can actually be turned into wellsprings of strength. Thus, large classes may be better for students than small ones; attending a top university may be the worst (or, at least, the most discouraging) educational choice; getting tougher on crime may actually increase crime as well as create other social disorders; being dyslexic or losing a parent at an early age may make one more persistent and intellectually agile than being able to read easily or having the comfort of a two-parent family; kids who don’t grow up playing basketball (for example) may approach the game in such fresh ways that they outscore kids who do; and people who are confronted en masse by life-threatening dangers—whether it be the bombing of London in World War II, the violent suppression of Civil Rights demonstrations in the U.S. or the brutalizing of Catholics in Northern Ireland by British soldiers—will almost always be strengthened rather than weakened by their shared experience.

To support these points, Gladwell intersperses a series of inspiring personal stories with summaries of related scientific studies in education, economics, psychology and sociology. His tone is relentlessly upbeat, but he in no way contends that being poor, dyslexic and downtrodden is the best start in life for anyone. He does make the case, however, for mining the dross of life for those small specks of gold and for looking beyond the obvious to the actual.