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| Image taken from the teaser for the book. |
Evicted:
Poverty and Profit in the American City by
Matthew Desmond (2016)
The most poignant aspect
of Desmond’s writing is how he understands the conjoined relations between
experience and data. The first 292 pages of Evicted
focus primarily on the lives of tenants in Milwaukee’s urban neighborhoods.
These tenants are mostly single mothers and the children for which they
struggle to provide. These stories immerse the reader in the everyday lives of
the urban poor, and their battles become more real and less imagined through
Desmond’s prose. In these sections, he sprinkles statistics amidst the
testimony, but the people are not lost in the numbers. And yet his epilogue “Home
and Hope” is twenty or so pages of data-driven argumentation. The shift is
beautiful and exactly as it should be. Moreover, Desmond does not hesitate to
propose solutions to a crisis he has both recreated through story and sketched
with numbers, and the result is the whole elephant in the room, not just a
trunk, not just a tusk, but the entire, unavoidable beast.