Evicted : poverty and profit in the American city / Matthew Desmond.
Record details
- ISBN: 024126085X
- ISBN: 9780241260852
- ISBN: 9780553447446
- ISBN: 0553447440
- ISBN: 0553447459
- ISBN: 9780553447453
- ISBN: 0553447432 (hardback)
- ISBN: 9780553447439 (hardback)
- ISBN: 0553447459 (paperback)
- ISBN: 9780553447453 (paperback)
- ISBN: 0553447432 (hardback)
- ISBN: 9780553447439 (hardback)
- ISBN: 9780553447439 : HRD
- ISBN: 0553447432 : HRD
- ISBN: 9780553447453
- ISBN: 0553447459
- Physical Description: xviii, 422 pages ; 21 cm
- Edition: First paperback edition.
- Publisher: New York : B\D\W\Y, Broadway Books, [2017]
- Copyright: ©2016
Content descriptions
General Note: | Includes Reader's guide. |
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 343-405) and index. |
Formatted Contents Note: | Prologue: Cold city -- Part One. Rent. The business of owning the city ; Making rent ; Hot water ; A beautiful collection ; Thirteenth Street ; Rat hole ; The sick ; Christmas in Room 400 -- Part Two. Out. Order some carryout ; Hypes for hire ; The 'hood is good ; Disposable ties ; E-24 ; High tolerance ; A nuisance ; Ashes on snow -- Part Three. After. This is America ; Lobster on food stamps ; Little ; Nobody wants the North Side ; Bigheaded boy ; If they give Momma the punishment ; The Serenity Club ; Can't win for losing -- Epilogue: Home and hope -- About this project. |
Summary, etc.: | "In this powerful work of narrative nonfiction, Desmond documents the months he spent living alongside tenants and landlords in Milwaukee, exploring the issues of poverty and homelessness in a segregated city. Taking readers on a journey into the daily lives of families facing eviction, sometimes repeatedly, the author creates a compelling and heartbreaking work that leaves readers wondering how we got here and what we can do to help."-- http://lj.libraryjournal.com "In Evicted, Harvard sociologist and MacArthur "Genius" Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads ... 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."-- Cover. |
Awards Note: | Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Winner, 2017. Pulitzer Prize winner, General Nonfiction, 2017. New York Times Best Sellers List. Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, 2017 The Pulitzer Prize, 2017 |
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Available copies
- 61 of 65 copies available at Bibliomation.
- 1 of 1 copy available at Rockville Public Library. (Show)
Holds
- 0 current holds with 65 total copies.
Other Formats and Editions
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Rockville Public Library | 339.4609 DES (Text) | 34035138902701 | Adult Nonfiction | Available | - |
Ansonia Public Library | 339.4 DES (Text) | 34045136849622 | Adult Nonfiction | Available | - |
Beardsley & Memorial Library - Winsted | 339.460 DESMOND (Text) | 33750000062032 | Adult Nonfiction | Available | - |
Beekley Community Library - New Hartford | 339.4 DESMOND, M. (Text) | 32544072441941 | Adult Nonfiction | Available | - |
Bethel Public Library | 339.4 DESMOND (Text) | 34030133682416 | Adult Nonfiction | Available | - |
Black Rock Branch - Bridgeport | 339.4 DESMOND (Text) | 34000076496389 | Adult Nonfiction | Available | - |
Brookfield Library | 339.4609/DESMOND (Text) | 34029134287019 | Adult Nonfiction | Available | - |
Burroughs-Saden Main - Bridgeport | 339.4 DESMOND (Text) | 34000081324287 | Adult Nonfiction | Available | - |
C.H. Booth Library - Newtown | 339.4 DES (Text) | 34014133719691 | Adult Nonfiction | Available | - |
C.H. Booth Library - Newtown | 339.4 DES (Text) | 34014139748553 | Recommended Reads | Available | - |
Electronic resources
- Available Online from Overdrive. Click here to download.
- Excerpt
- Sample
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Kirkus Review
Evicted : Poverty and Profit in the American City
Kirkus Reviews
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
A groundbreaking work on the central role of housing in the lives of the poor. Based on two years (2008-2009) spent embedded with eight poor families in Milwaukee, Desmond (Sociology and Social Science/Harvard Univ.; On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters, 2007, etc.) delivers a gripping, novelistic narrative exploring the ceaseless cycle of "making rent, delaying eviction, or finding another place to live when homeless" as experienced by adults and children, both black and white, surviving in trailer parks and ghettos. "We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty," writes the author. Once rare, eviction is now commonplace for millions of Americans each year, most often as a result of insufficient government support, rising rent and utility costs, and stagnant incomes. Having gained unusual access to these families, Desmond immerses us in the lives of Sherrena Tarver, a teacher-turned-landlord who rents inner-city units to the black poor; Tobin Charney, who nets more than $400,000 yearly on 131 poorly maintained trailers rented (at $550 a month) to poor whites; and disparate tenants who struggle to make rent for cramped, decrepit units plagued by poor plumbing, lack of heat, and code violations. The latter include Crystal, 18, raised in more than two dozen foster homes, who moved in with three garbage bags of clothes, and Arleen, a single mother, who contacted more than 80 apartment owners in her search for a new home. Their frantic experiencesthey spend an astonishing 70 to 80 percent of their incomes on rentmake for harrowing reading, interspersed with moving moments revealing their resilience and humanity. "All this suffering is shameful and unnecessary," writes Desmond, who bolsters his stories with important new survey findings. He argues that universal housing vouchers and publicly funded legal services for the evicted (90 percent lack attorneys in housing courts) would help alleviate this growing, often overlooked housing crisis. This stunning, remarkable booka scholar's 21st-century How the Other Half Livesdemands a wide audience. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
BookList Review
Evicted : Poverty and Profit in the American City
Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
*Starred Review* It's hard to paint a slumlord as a sympathetic character, but Harvard professor Desmond manages to do so in this compelling look at home evictions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of America's most segregated cities. Two landlords are profiled here: Sherrena, who owns dozens of dilapidated units on Milwaukee's infamous North Side, and Tobin, who runs a trailer park on the South Side. They're in it to make money, to be sure, but they also have a tendency to rent to those in need and to look the other way. More often than not, however, they find themselves hauling tenants to eviction court, and here we meet eight families. Among them are Arleen, a single mother dragging her two youngest sons across town in urgent search of a warm, safe place; Scott, a drug addict desperate to crawl up from rock bottom; and Larraine, who loses all of her belongings when she's evicted. Desmond's natural storytelling style easily moves from engaging narrative (at times a tad florid, particularly when describing events he was not present for) to straight reporting. He does a marvelous job telling these harrowing stories of people who find themselves in bad situations, shining a light on how eviction sets people up to fail. He also makes the case that eviction disproportionately affects women (and, worse, their children). This is essential reading for anyone interested in social justice, poverty, and feminist issues, but its narrative nonfiction style will also draw general readers.--Vnuk, Rebecca Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Times Review
Evicted : Poverty and Profit in the American City
New York Times
January 1, 2017
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company
THE ABUNDANCE: Narrative Essays Old and New, by Annie Dillard. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Dillard selects 22 of her best pieces from the past four decades, including dispatches from coastal Maine and a New Age Catholic church. Across these essays, "her preferred method is to transform, through the alchemy of metaphor, natural phenomena into spiritual ones," Donovan Hohn said here. EVICTED: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. (Broadway, $17.) In this wrenching account, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, chronicles eight impoverished families around Milwaukee for whom eviction is a near-constant fear. While these tenants live in squalor, their landlords and others profit from their misfortune; the book casts light on how the poor are regularly exploited. NOT IN GOD'S NAME: Confronting Religious Violence, by Jonathan Sacks. (Schocken, $16.95.) Sacks, a rabbi, argues that religion must be part of the solution to combating what he sees as politicized religious extremism. Drawing on Genesis for guidance, he outlines an argument that justice and decency should prevail over loyalty toward one's own group. THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS, by Edna O'Brien. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) A mysterious outsider arrives in a small Irish town, leaving residents at turns curious and skeptical. There's reason for concern: He's a Balkan War criminal, but succeeds in transfixing the locals, who view him as a healer or holy man, until his secret comes out. His relationship with a young woman, her naïveté dispelled, threatens to upend her life, but she gains strength and confidence from the ordeal. O'Brien's "unsettling fabulist vision" recalls "Nabokov in his darker, less playful mode," our reviewer, Joyce Carol Oates, wrote here. MR. SPLITFOOT, by Samantha Hunt. (Mariner, $14.95.) Ruth and Nat, two orphans in a foster home headed by a religious fanatic, discover an ability to speak to the dead; when a con man learns of their talent, he's eager to profit from it. In alternating chapters, the story jumps to the present day, when Ruth - who has become eerily mute - lures her pregnant niece on a journey by foot across New York State. SUDDEN DEATH, byÃIvaro Enrigue. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Riverhead, $16.) In a novel bursting with historical figures - Galileo, Anne Boleyn, Caravaggio - 16th-century monks imbue tennis matches with spiritual import; a French executioner is himself executed; and Spanish conquistadors carry out their bloody siege of Mexico, a merger of civilizations with "planetary aftershocks."D
CHOICE_Magazine Review
Evicted : Poverty and Profit in the American City
CHOICE
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Harvard sociologist Desmond has written a first-rate ethnography of a surprisingly understudied phenomenon. When he found that most studies of poor people and poor places looked only at the poor, he decided to study where the poor and rich intersect. Eviction is one such place. This study mostly reports the lives of Milwaukeeans, black and white, poor tenants and rich landlords. Desmond spent a year living with them. He then commissioned surveys to bolster the big-picture context of the ethnography, both of renters in general and of evicted tenants in particular. The statistics are used very lightly--readers mostly hear the stories of a few representative people. Policy prescriptions are saved for the end. The constant churning of the slums tears at the social fabric, rippling out from the poor places to all of society. This fine work will shape the discussion of a sharply growing trend, the business of evicting the poor. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. --Beau Weston, Centre College
Publishers Weekly Review
Evicted : Poverty and Profit in the American City
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Gripping storytelling and meticulous research undergird this outstanding ethnographic study, in which Desmond (On the Fireline), an associate professor of sociology at Harvard, explores the impact of eviction on poverty-stricken families in Milwaukee, Wis. Living first in a rundown trailer park with predominantly white tenants and then in an African-American inner-city neighborhood, Desmond conducted fieldwork by observing and asking questions of his neighbors; later, he collected extensive data about eviction specifically in the private rental market. The book reveals the concentrated suffering of people repeatedly faced with the loss of their homes. He shares the stories of Lamar, a double amputee raising adolescent boys; Scott, who tries to conquer his heroin addiction and return to his nursing career; single mom Arleen, her sons, and their cat, Little; and five other families. In one gut-wrenching scene, Desmond shadows a moving crew as they evict numerous households in one day, finding in one tenant's face "the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours." Desmond identifies affordable housing as a leading social justice issue of our time and offers concrete solutions to the crisis. Agent: Jill Kneerim, Kneerim and Williams. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
Evicted : Poverty and Profit in the American City
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Desmond's (sociology, Harvard Univ.) eye-opening and revelatory book clearly conveys that one will never truly understand poverty without grappling with the crisis of precarious housing. The narrative follows the lives of several families and individuals living in some of the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee and tracks their harrowing searches for affordable shelter. This nearly futile pursuit of home is made worse by an uncaring bureaucracy. Desmond lays out evidence that the relationships between landlords and low-income tenants and the apparatus that supports the status quo-eviction courts being one conspicuous piece-are thoroughly broken. This timely examination of some of the root causes of systemic poverty is flawlessly read by Dion Graham. VERDICT A copy of Evicted should be in every public library and in the hands of every politician. ["This resource is highly recommended for academic libraries as well as public-policy advocates seeking to understand issues relating to the lack of affordable housing": LJ 1/16 starred review of the Crown hc.]--Denis Frias, -Mississauga Lib. Syst., Ont. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.