"Evicted: Poverty and Profiteering in American Cities" Author: [US] Matthew Desmond Shanxi Education Press

★Professor Xiang Biao recommended this book, selected as one of Barack Obama and Bill Gates' best books of the year, and a non-fiction masterpiece that won praise from countless celebrities and media

In 2019, it was selected as one of the top ten non-fiction books of the 2010s by Time; in 2018, it was selected as one of the top ten books of the year in Shenzhen Reading Month, one of the top ten books of the year in Sina’s Good Books List, one of the books of the year by Curiosity Daily, one of the books of the year by Interface Culture, and one of the social science and documentary lists of Douban; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 2017; in 2016, it was selected as one of the top ten books of the year by The New York Times, the American Book Critics Circle Award, and the best books of the year by dozens of foreign media outlets, including The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Fortune, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times.

★From the housing problem, we can get into the daily life of the lower class in the United States, unveil the magnificent curtain of the American dream, and peek into the sinister abyss of the gap between the rich and the poor.

In the United States, a representative of developed countries, "housing" is also a big problem for the poor. Compared with the rich, the houses they live in are not only old, broken, and small, but the rent is even higher than that of houses in wealthy areas. The huge difference in housing conditions directly determines the completely different life experiences of the rich and the poor in the United States.

★Teenage mother, single father, drug-addicted male nurse, vicious female landlord... The stories of eight families outline dozens of different life trajectories

The characters involved in this book include all kinds of people in the lower class of American society: white people, black people, a 19-year-old pregnant teenage mother, a father who lost both legs and raised two sons alone, and a female landlord who drives around collecting rent all day. What connects these people with different backgrounds is the same problem: housing.

★ Work experience, interpersonal relationships, criminal records, financial status... three-dimensionally depict the characters in the book and faithfully present the appearance of the grassroots people

The author meticulously observes and records every aspect of these people's daily lives: some work in fast food restaurants, some live on welfare; some take drugs, some rob; some can go on vacation to Jamaica, while others can't even pay the rent. Countless details of life merge into vivid faces.

★ Courts, housing authorities, police stations, welfare agencies... Understand the American system through the way Americans interact with the government

The people in the book often deal with the government for houses, and the author follows the people in the book to various government departments, witnessing tenants tearfully begging judges for leniency in punishment, and ruthless sheriffs evicting poor tenants... Although rents are regulated by the market, the influence of the government is always lingering.

★Drug stores, RV camps, fire scenes... Enter and exit dazzling social places to experience the living environment of the poor in the United States from all aspects

The environment around the house not only determines the quality of the house, but also affects the lives of the tenants. Some of the houses in the book are in warm and cohesive communities, some are burned down by fire, and some are not even communities at all, but just a camp consisting of hundreds of RVs, where people sell drugs 24 hours a day...

★ No academic airs, no abstruse concepts, no difficult terms, write sociological field research records that everyone can understand

During the research, the author moved to the community where the people in the book lived, chatted with them, played cards with them, ate and lived with them, helped them move, and looked after their children. This humble attitude not only eliminated the barriers between the two sides, but also gave the author a popular and down-to-earth writing style and narrative method, making academic works as easy to understand and read as novels.

"Sweeping Out the Door" is a very serious academic work. However, it is very different from academic works in the usual sense; there are no theoretical assumptions, no frameworks, and even no concepts. The whole book is like an in-depth documentary, moving from one scene to another. The author Matthew Desmond's straightforward and detailed description is like a close-up shot, presenting the expressions, tones, feelings and thoughts of each character directly to us. What impressed me most is that Matthew can "see things in what he sees." We often ignore what is in front of us, and often see things that do not exist at all.

——Xiang Biao (Professor of Anthropology, Oxford University)

If you want to understand how intertwined the problems that cause poverty are, read this book about Milwaukee's eviction crisis. Desmond paints a vivid portrait of life for the poor in America. Evicted gave me a clearer understanding of what it's like to be poor in America than any other book I've read.

—Bill Gates

This sensitive, achingly beautiful ethnography rethinks the problem of poverty in America - the difficulty of even having a roof over your head.

--Robert Putnam [Harvard University professor, author of Bowling Alone]

Matthew Desmond is a Harvard scholar, a sociologist, or you could say he's an ethnographer, but I'd also call him a journalist. His book sets a new standard for reporting on poverty.

——Barbara Ehrenreich [Famous American investigative journalist, author of My Life at the Bottom]

This is a non-fiction work that records "the lives of the poor in wealthy countries", focusing on the dark corners outside the neon lights of the city and the increasingly serious housing problem in the United States. Sociologist Matthew Desmond visited and investigated in-depth poor communities, and told the life stories of eight American families on the edge of despair. This is an enlightenment book about poverty and eviction, and also a work that calls for action and change, which has many implications for urban development and economic issues in modern society.

——Reviews of the top ten books of 2018 Sina Good Books List

This is a very serious academic work. But this book is like a novel, and it is possible to immerse yourself in the daily life of the grassroots people in Milwaukee. The field research method of anthropology has been pushed to a new level by Matthew. In Matthew's discussion, everyone is alive. Without Matthew's efforts and such down-to-earth field research, the people in Milwaukee who couldn't rent a house after making dozens of phone calls would not be known.

——"Beijing News Book Review Weekly"

Desmons explains to readers how the US's forced eviction policy turns extreme poverty for some people into huge profits for others. Whether one can stay in the city is not a natural elimination game of survival of the fittest. Poverty is not only caused by low income, but also the product of commercial market plunder. This is the important revelation that "Swept Away" brings to us today.

——"Interface Culture"

Evicted is a compassionate story about the American housing system and how it affects every aspect of life, from education to parenting. Few books in the past decade have done more to open Americans’ minds to the limits of the American Dream, and it’s a deeply reported call for new policies that address the most basic need of every human being: a roof over their heads.

--"era"

With its in-depth research, "Evicted" reveals the connection between large-scale evictions and poverty since the 2008 US economic crisis: being poor does not mean being evicted; but once evicted, people will become poorer and poorer.

——Award Speech for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Best Nonfiction Book

In 2007, the US subprime mortgage crisis broke out and housing prices fell to a low point. Some landlords took the opportunity to buy properties in slums and rent them out to the poor, turning cheap houses into gold mines.

Among the poor people who rent houses, there are single mothers with several children, male nurses who are addicted but kind-hearted, and disabled people who work for landlords to pay rent. They live next to snakes, insects, rats and ants, and the water pipes are blocked all year round. Water, electricity and gas are cut off at any time; even so, if they owe rent, they will be kicked out. Then the landlord will rent the house to someone else, and the cycle will repeat...

Landlords, tenants, government departments, private housing market, who is profiting? Who is responsible for poverty? Sociologist Matthew Desmond went deep into two slums, interviewed more than 30 landlords, went to eviction court thousands of times, and read countless archives. He used the lives of eight poor families as clues to tell their quarrels, struggles and pleas around housing and survival, presenting a vivid picture of the lower class in the United States, and exploring the root cause of the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer.

Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was formerly an assistant professor of sociology at Harvard University. As an ethnographer, Desmond focuses on issues such as housing justice, urban life, and exploitation of the lower classes. He has published five works. His research has been funded by the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation. His articles are often seen in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In 2015, Desmond won the MacArthur Genius Award for his outstanding research on eviction issues and housing policies. In 2016, he was named one of the "50 People Who Influence American Political Issues."