"Astonishing... Desmond has set a new standard for reporting on poverty."
--Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times Book Review "After reading
Evicted, you'll realize you cannot have a serious conversation about poverty without talking about housing. . . . The book is that good, and it's that unignorable."--
Jennifer Senior, New York Times "This book gave me a better sense of what it is like to be very poor in this country than anything else I have read. . . . It is beautifully written, thought-provoking, and unforgettable."
--Bill Gates "Inside my copy of his book, Mr. Desmond scribbled a note: 'home = life.' Too many in Washington don't understand that. We need a government that will partner with communities, from Appalachia to the suburbs to downtown Cleveland, to make hard work pay off for all these overlooked Americans."
--Senator Sherrod Brown,
Wall Street Journal "My God, what [
Evicted] lays bare about American poverty. It is devastating and infuriating and a necessary read."
--Roxane Gay,
author of Bad Feminist and Difficult Women "Written with the vividness of a novel, [
Evicted] offers a dark mirror of middle-class America's obsession with real estate, laying bare the workings of the low end of the market, where evictions have become just another part of an often lucrative business model."
--Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times "In spare and penetrating prose . . . Desmond has made it impossible to consider poverty without grappling with the role of housing. This pick [as best book of 2016] was not close."
--Carlos Lozada, Washington Post "An essential piece of reportage about poverty and profit in urban America."
--Geoff Dyer, The Guardian "It doesn't happen every week (or every month, or even year), but every once in a while a book comes along that changes the national conversation. . . .
Evicted looks to be one of those books."
--Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review "Should be required reading in an election year, or any other."
--Entertainment Weekly "Powerful, monstrously effective . . . The power of this book abides in the indelible impression left by its stories."
--Jill Leovy, The American Scholar "Gripping and important . . . [Desmond's] portraits are vivid and unsettling."
--Jason DeParle, New York Review of Books "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."
--The Boston Globe "[An] impressive work of scholarship . . . As Mr. Desmond points out, eviction has been neglected by urban sociologists, so his account fills a gap. His methodology is scrupulous."
--Wall Street Journal
