Evicted (Desmond) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
An exhaustively researched, vividly realized and above all, unignorable book—after Evicted, it will no longer be possible to have a serious discussion about poverty without having a serious discussion about housing.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times


It doesn't happen every week (or every month, or even year), but every once in a while a book comes along that changes the national conversation... Evicted looks to be one of those books.
Pamela Paul, Ed. - New York Times Book Review


Astonishing...Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard—a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist too, and one who, like Katherine Boo in her study of a Mumbai slum, has set a new standard for reporting on poverty.
Barbara Ehrenreich - New York Times Book Review


Written with the vividness of a novel, [Evicted] offers a dark mirror of middle-class America’s obsession with real estate, laying bare the workings of the low end of the market, where evictions have become just another part of an often lucrative business model.
Jennifer Schuessler - New York Times


Thank you, Matthew Desmond. Thank you for writing about destitution in America with astonishing specificity yet without voyeurism or judgment. Thank you for showing it is possible to compose spare, beautiful prose about a complicated policy problem. Thank you for giving flesh and life to our squabbles over inequality, so easily consigned to quintiles and zero-sum percentages. Thank you for proving that the struggle to keep a roof over one’s head is a cause, not just a characteristic of poverty.... Evicted is an extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography. Desmond has made it impossible to ever again consider poverty in America without tackling the role of housing—and without grappling with Evicted.
Washington Post


[An] impressive work of scholarship...novelistically detailed.... As Mr. Desmond points out, eviction has been neglected by urban sociologists, so his account fills a gap. His methodology is scrupulous.
Wall Street Journal


[Desmond] tells a complex, achingly powerful story…. There have been many well-received urban ethnographies in recent years, from Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day to Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Desmond’s Evicted surely deserves to takes [its] place among these. It is an exquisitely crafted, meticulously researched exploration of life on the margins, providing a voice to people who have been shamefully ignored—or, worse, demonized—by opinion makers over the course of decades.
Boston Globe


[Evicted] is harrowing, heartbreaking, and heavily researched, and the plight of the characters will remain with you long after you close the book's pages.... Desmond's meticulousness shows how precision is not at odds with compassionate storytelling of the underprivileged. Indeed, [it] is the respect that Evicted shows for its characters' flaws and mistakes that makes the book impossible to forget.
Christian Science Monitor


[A] carefully researched, often heartbreaking book.
Chicago Tribune


Evicted should provoke extensive public policy discussions. It is a magnificent, richly textured book with a Tolstoyan approach: telling it like it is but with underlying compassion and a respect for the humanity of each character, major or minor.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


By immersing himself in the everyday lives of poor renters, Desmond follows in the tradition of James Agee, whose monumental 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men pounded the reader with clear-eyed and brutal descriptions of rural poverty in the Deep South.
Minneapolis StarTribune


Evicted is that rare work that has something genuinely new to say about poverty. Desmond makes a convincing case that policymakers and academics have overlooked the role of the private rental market, and that eviction "'is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty."... Evictions have become routine. Desmond’s book should begin to change that.
San Francisco Chronicle


Should be required reading in an election year, or any other.
Entertainment Weekly


Powerful, monstrously effective…[Evicted] documents with impressive steadiness of purpose and command of detail the lives of impoverished renters at the bottom of Milwaukee’s housing market…. In describing the plight of these people, Desmond reveals the confluence of seemingly unrelated forces that have conspired to create a thoroughly humiliated class of the almost or soon-to-be homeless…. But the power of this book abides in the indelible impression left by its stories.
Jill Leovy - American Scholar


Gripping and important…. Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, cites plenty of statistics but it’s his ethnographic gift that lends the work such force. He’s one of a rare academic breed: a poverty expert who engages with the poor. His portraits are vivid and unsettling…. It’s not easy to show desperate people using drugs or selling sex and still convey their courage and dignity. Evicted pulls it off.
Jason DeParle - New York Review of Books


A shattering account of life on the American fringe, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted shows the reality of a housing crisis that few among the political or media elite ever think much about, let alone address. It takes us to the center of what would be seen as an emergency of significant proportions if the poor had any legitimate political agency in American life.
New Republic


Wrenching and revelatory…. Other sociologists have ventured before into the realm of popular literature… but none in recent memory have so successfully bridged in a single work the demands of the academy (statistical studies and deep reviews of the existing literature) and the narrative necessity of showing what has brought these beautiful, flawed humans to their miseries…. A powerfully convincing book that examines the poor’s impossible housing situation at point-blank range.
Nation


(Starred review.) Gripping storytelling and meticulous research undergird this outstanding ethnographic study…. Desmond identifies affordable housing as a leading social justice issue of our time and offers concrete solutions to the crisis.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Highly recommended
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A groundbreaking work…. Desmond delivers a gripping, novelistic narrative… This stunning, remarkable book—a scholar’s 21st-century How the Other Half Lives—demands a wide audience.
Booklist


(Starred review.) A groundbreaking work… Desmond delivers a gripping, novelistic narrative… This stunning, remarkable book – a scholar’s 21st-century How the Other Half Lives – demands a wide audience.
Kirkus Reviews