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Evicted
by Matthew Desmond · 2016
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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a 2016 non-fiction book by American author Matthew Desmond. Set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Desmond's goal in the book is to highlight the issues of extreme poverty, affordable housing, and economic exploitation in the United States. Evicted was well-received and won multiple book awards such as the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. The Pulitzer committee selected the book "for a deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty."
Recommended by
"“Enthralling” might seem like a bizarre way to describe the stories of real people teetering on the brink of homelessness in Milwaukee, but this account of how the system is stacked against poor people is powerfully written. It reads like great fiction, but it’s deeply and compassionately reported. (Author Matthew Desmond — a Harvard sociologist and recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant” — has his own memories of his family losing a home to foreclosure.) Books about social issues can sometimes feel like homework, but reading Evicted is a gripping, moving and eye-opening experience."
"On the terrible problem of homelessness, it would be absorbing to read Matthew Desmond's definitive book, Evicted."
"I love books that demonstrate this, like Matthew Desmond's "Evicted," or George Saunders's "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.""
""Evicted," by Matthew Desmond. My God, what that book lays bare about American poverty. It is devastating and infuriating and a necessary read."