Jennifer Masterson's Reviews > Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

This just won The Pulitzer! Yay! "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City" is probably the most important book that I have ever read!!! If you are to read one non-fiction book this year it should probably be this book!!! This should be required reading in high school! I learned about poverty and poor renters, the eviction process, and scumbag landlords.

This book is about 8 families in Milwaukee. These are both Caucasian and African American families. The book is broken down into 3 parts. They are real life stories. These stories are so unbelievable that they read like fiction. I cannot do this book justice. The reason I read it was because of my friend Shelby. She wrote a phenomenal review. Here it is. Please check it out:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

Many of these families were spending up to 80 percent of their income just on rent! This left little money for anything else. The system was meant for families to spend up to 30 percent of their income on rent. It's truly unbelievable and eye opening!

I listened to the audio version. I would say the narration is about 4 Stars. I wish there were two narrators instead of one. The different voices all started sounding the same after awhile. In all fairness, this is a tough book for a narrator to tackle and when he was telling the story and not doing the individual voices he did a great job.

The one character I identified with the most was Scott. I think it's because he made me realize this could happen to me. Scott was making 80k a year as a nurse at one point but became addicted to pain killers and then his life spirals down from there into harder drugs and homelessness. Although there is hope for him, I'm not giving spoilers so you are going to have to read the book to find out what happens to him. His story made me realize this could happen to anybody! Even if you have never been part of the welfare system you can still end up homeless.

This is not a happy book but it is a very important one!!! The author is Sociologist, Matthew Desmond, and he is an amazing person, too. Please read this book and tell your friends about it. There needs to be changes made to the welfare system in the United States. People should not be living in filth and squalor like this with little chance of moving up. Children should not be shuffled around from school to school, either. The author suggests a universal housing voucher program made cost efficient. We need change in the United States and we need it now!