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Evicted
687 pages
A devastating, intimately reported descent into the machinery of American poverty that reads like a gripping, heartbreaking novel.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like having a veil pulled back on a crisis hiding in plain sight. It moves with a steady, narrative momentum, reading less like a dry sociological study and more like a gripping, multi-perspective novel. The prose is remarkably clear and deeply empathetic, refusing to look away from the claustrophobic, grinding reality of housing insecurity. You sit inside a mood of mounting tension and heartbreak as the systemic traps closing around the subjects become agonizingly clear. It is a sobering, devastating experience that replaces abstract statistics with unforgettable human faces. Readers who gravitate toward rigorous, compassionate journalism that fundamentally shifts how they view the world will find themselves completely absorbed, leaving the final pages with a lingering sense of righteous urgency.
- Mood
- devastating
- claustrophobic
- sobering
- tense
- Tone
- empathetic
- urgent
- unflinching
- rigorous
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- systemic failure · cycle of poverty · housing insecurity · economic exploitation · human resilience
- The writing
- Clear, novelistic, and deeply immersive, blending rigorous sociological data with intimate, character-driven storytelling.
- The arc
- Moves from a shocking awakening to the realities of systemic poverty to a profound, lingering sense of righteous outrage and heartbreak.
- Who it's for
- Readers who want to understand the hidden machinery of American inequality through deeply reported, human-centered narratives.
Content notes
- poverty
- homelessness
- drug addiction
- domestic abuse
- systemic racism
About the book
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."
Description from Open Library.
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