...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. Like Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, or Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, or Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, this sweeping, yearslong project makes us consider inequality and economic justice in ways we previously had not. It’s sure to capture the attention of politicians. (Hillary, what are you reading this summer?) Through data and analysis and storytelling, it issues a call to arms without ever once raising its voice.
Evicted is an extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography. Desmond has made it impossible to ever again consider poverty in America without tackling the central role of housing — and without grappling with Evicted.
By examining one city through the microscopic lens of housing...[Desmond] shows us how the system that produces that pain and poverty was created and is maintained. I can’t remember when an ethnographic study so deepened my understanding of American life.
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.
...[an] astonishing book...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.
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.
A shattering account of life on the American fringe, 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.
[Evicted] 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. It is the story of a calamity made possible by the turning of too many blind eyes over too many years.
[T]he result of [Desmond's] odyssey among members of the down-and-out renter class is a terrific new book, Evicted, an intimate and beautiful work as poignant as it is insightful...Often you hear that an author writes well for an academic, as if he were being graded on a curve. But Desmond is a good writer, period. His prose is vivid and energetic; his physical descriptions can be small gems.
The poverty of others brings up terrible questions of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God and what if, were your circumstances or skin color or gender different, that could be you. Your gaze pulls away. But Desmond writes so powerfully and with such persuasive math that he turns your head back and keeps it there: Yes, it could be you. But if home is so crucial a place that its loss causes this much pain, Evicted argues, making it possible for more of us might change everything.
Desmond’s meticulousness shows how precision is not at odds with compassionate storytelling of the underprivileged. Indeed, is the respect that Evicted shows for its characters' flaws and mistakes that makes the book impossible to forget.
