MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)\"Desmond is a Princeton sociology professor whose previous book, Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city, won a Pulitzer prize. So perhaps it’s not surprising that so many readers are eager to discover all the ways in which they are complicit in America’s scandalous levels of poverty and destitution. Still, it’s a little shocking to realize that the bien pensant upper middle classes who care about the poor, and form the target audience for this book, are among the people the author holds responsible for the problem ... It sets out an extended moral argument, illuminated by striking facts and personal anecdotes, grounded in the literature on poverty and its causes. Written in direct, jargon-free prose, with most of the scholarly apparatus consigned to endnotes, it aims at a general audience. Poverty experts will be familiar with the material, though they are unlikely to have seen the facts explained in quite this way ... Poverty, by America is a passionate moral appeal, grounded in a distinctive theory. But is the theory persuasive? And will people be moved to action? Theories of poverty generally point either to the poor themselves as the cause of the problem, or to the elites who dominate economic and political institutions. The distinctiveness of this account is that it highlights a different cause: the conduct of \'comfortable, privileged, secure\' people who benefit from exploiting the poor. But this causal claim is where the theory shows its flaws.\
