{ "item_title" : "Evicted", "item_author" : [" Matthew Desmond "], "item_description" : "NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE - ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE - ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY - A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY One of the most acclaimed books of our time, this modern classic has set a new standard for reporting on poverty (Barbara Ehrenreich, The New York Times Book Review). In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur Genius Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as wrenching and revelatory (The Nation), vivid and unsettling (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America's most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: President Barack Obama, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Esquire, BuzzFeed, Fortune, San Francisco Chronicle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Politico, The Week, Chicago Public Library, BookPage, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Shelf Awareness WINNER OF: The National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction - The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction - The Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction - The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism - The PEN/New England Award - The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE AND THE KIRKUS PRIZE Evicted stands among the very best of the social justice books.--Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and Commonwealth Gripping and moving--tragic, too.--Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones Evicted is that rare work that has something genuinely new to say about poverty.--San Francisco Chronicle", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/55/344/743/0553447432_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "30.00", "online_price" : "30.00", "our_price" : "30.00", "club_price" : "30.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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Read it and weep. You’ll find it hard not to. Written by a Harvard sociologist, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City has the character development and dramatic drive of a first-rate novel. The core of Desmond’s study was conducted in Milwaukee from 2008 to 2009 and focuses on the day-to-day agonies of specific people who were frequently evicted from their homes by private landlords. In most cases, rent took from 50 to 70 percent of the tenants’ monthly income, a situation that made late payment or non-payment inevitable—and always reason to evict.

What makes Matthew Desmond’s account so compelling is that he lived among the people whose travails he chronicles. Some of the victims—mostly black and often women with children—lived in the inner city; the others, overwhelmingly white, lived in a dilapidated trailer park on the edge of town. He also spent time with landlords to get their sides of the story.

Again and again we witness the tenants’ last-minute attempts to find rent money, negotiating with their landlords, sitting helplessly in court as judges rule against them, watching their possessions being tossed onto the sidewalk and explaining to their kids why they’re moving to yet another school. Desmond is clearly sympathetic, but he is no sentimentalist. He reveals all the blemishes of the dispossessed—their unwise ways with money, addiction to drugs and alcohol and casual attitudes toward birth control. Still, he knows that poverty seldom builds character.

Desmond argues that government-subsidized housing vouchers should be available to low-income families and that landlords should be required to accept them. “Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country,” he concludes. “The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”

 

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.