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

4.5

I don't often read non-fiction and, almost always after making the effort to, I realise I should be making more room for it in my reading diet. Especially for books of the quality of Evicted. This was everything I would hope for and more from a Pulitzer prize winner. A cataclysmic expose of the affordable housing crisis and grinding poverty in the United States.

In the author's own words-

I wanted to try and write a book about poverty that didn't focus exclusively on poor people or poor places. Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process.

I thought he succeeded remarkable well in this goal. Desmond spends an enormous amount of time following both renters and landlords, essentially embedding himself in their lives. The access he gains was surprising to me. He follows them to housing court, AA meetings, homeless shelters, through the mill of multiple evictions and the never-ending search for a place to call home. He witnesses moments of despair and astounding unfairness.

It is easy to despise the Landlords here but I thought this was a very balanced reporting of the struggles of both parties, placing them squarely within a social system that provides the conditions for this inequality to occur. He also leaves the reader with some hope that this is not as an intractable problem as it first seems.

I was unprepared for how emotionally draining this book would be, and this is a testament to how empathetically he writes about these Dickensian-characters. I was surprised how attached I became to these people, willing them to succeed. I didn't want to leave them at the end of the book. A startling achievement for non-fiction.

This book makes it into my top reads of 2018 and it has made an indelible impression on me.