Reviews tagging 'Gun violence'

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

21 reviews

katerockreads's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Addiction

Minor: Alcohol, Cursing, Drug use, Fire/Fire injury, and Gun violence

maevebeck's review against another edition

emotional sad tense slow-paced

3.0

excellent source for understanding poverty in a more intimate and human way. overall the story desmond tells is confusing and kind of all over the place. few stories actually have a beginning middle and end ?? i understand that they’re real stories tho and that’s not always possible. very good book though!

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Abandonment, Mental illness, Pedophilia, Pregnancy, Classism, Fire/Fire injury, Incest, Murder, Sexual assault, Animal death, Child death, Racism, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Violence, Addiction, and Child abuse

albernikolauras's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

A heart-wrenching nonfiction book following families in Milwaukee that were evicted during the 2008 and 2009 recession. Desmond gives each individual humanity within his writing as he describes them without judgment or censor, from the landlords to the eviction company to the individuals left homeless afterward.

There wasn't a moment that you didn't feel the anger and frustration that we choose to treat people this way - as if their life doesn't matter. Desmond is clear about the ripple effect instable housing has on people - emotionally and physically - and the community they live in. How it effects the children stuck in this cycle, hopping from school to school while balancing taking care of their siblings.

Desmond wraps up the book describing his place within these situations, how he lived near them, when he intervened to help the families he followed, and what we can do to help prevent the worst of this. It is frightening that this has likely only gotten worse with the increasing housing prices and cost of living with no real increase in government support.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Classism, Drug use, Addiction, and Mental illness

Moderate: Domestic abuse, Police brutality, Pregnancy, Child abuse, Infidelity, Pedophilia, Violence, Toxic friendship, Racism, Gun violence, Sexual assault, and War

larbster90's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective fast-paced

5.0

One of the best non-fiction books I've read. Tells the story of eviction not just with numbers, but with human stories. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racial slurs

Moderate: Drug abuse, Gun violence, Toxic relationship, Alcoholism, Addiction, Animal death, Racism, Physical abuse, Child death, and Drug use

Minor: Suicidal thoughts, Death, Grief, and Schizophrenia/Psychosis

bri4103's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective sad

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Addiction, Alcohol, Racism, and Gun violence

Minor: Suicidal thoughts and Murder

fogthroughthevalley's review against another edition

emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Contains both personal stories of eviction and academic analysis of the issue. The anecdotes draw you in and the issue solidifies in a way that might not already be apparent for people who have not experienced poverty and eviction firsthand. I would deem this an essential read for anyone interested in better understanding the inhumane systems currently in place in the United States.

Two quotes/sections of the book that immediately stood out to me:
"When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of all sorts of shipwrecked humanity, they lost confidence in its political capacity. 
Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma, believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing events, were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives. 
This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood's actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering they perceived around them. 
A community that saw so clearly its own pain, had a difficult time also sensing its potential."

"But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality."
 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Addiction, Drug abuse, Drug use, Fire/Fire injury, Gun violence, and Pregnancy

edie_reads's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racial slurs, Racism, and Physical abuse

Moderate: Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Child abuse, Child death, Cursing, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Drug abuse, Gun violence, Mental illness, Murder, Racism, Sexism, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Fire/Fire injury, Toxic friendship, Toxic relationship, and Grief

Minor: Animal death, Pregnancy, Mental illness, Excrement, and Cursing

samvanz12's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative sad medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Addiction, Drug abuse, Drug use, and Violence

Moderate: Suicidal thoughts, Gun violence, Domestic abuse, Toxic relationship, and Racial slurs

katsudonburi's review against another edition

challenging informative sad slow-paced

5.0

A brutal and incredibly upsetting look at poverty and the damage eviction does to people and their families; what keeps it from reading as trauma porn is the author's deep commitment to the humanity of his subjects and constant examination of the systems that have not so much failed them as been designed to exploit them. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Addiction, Alcoholism, Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Police brutality, Racism, Sexual assault, Suicidal thoughts, and Suicide

Minor: Animal death, Forced institutionalization, Panic attacks/disorders, and Rape

sherbertwells's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

“We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.” (5)

Evicted by Matthew Desmond challenged my biases.

Not my biases about poverty; it pretty much confirmed my perspective there. Landlords buy properties, neglect them and take advantage of racialized poverty to fatten their own pockets. Poor women, especially single mothers, face a nigh-impossible struggle to build a stable home. Neighborhoods and the availability of housing can improve or destabilize a person’s life.

I believed these things before reading Evicted and Desmond’s extensive footnotes didn’t contradict them. The bias that Evicted overturned was a subtle parasite that I didn’t know had made a home in my system: the bias against sociologists.

As the child of an urban historian (one who studies Milwaukee, no less), I was raised believing in the gaslamp of context, the noble, futile quest through years of obfuscation and the sacred darkness of the unknowable. Compared to valiant historians, sociologists seemed to have it easy. If they wanted to do research, they could just step outside and interview their neighbors! 

But Desmond’s solid storytelling opened my eyes to the potential of a good sociologist, which he is. Specifically, he’s an ethnologist, one whose front-line research forms the backbone of Evicted. The book follows several families—some living in a trailer park on Milwaukee’s white South Side, others living in predominately-black North Side slums—face eviction during the winter of 2008, when America’s housing crisis led to widespread displacement among low-income households. Their individual journeys paint a portrait of poverty in the 21st century, humanizing a group that wealthy and middle-class readers might otherwise demonize, victimize or otherwise simply ignore.

“People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to” (219).

While the stories of renters like Arleen, Scott and Larraine provide remarkable testimony on the experiences of being poor in America, Desmond’s scholarship is what makes Evicted convincing. The footnotes go on for 79 pages—25% of the length of the actual story—and provide illuminating explanations as well as citations for everything from Carol Stack’s All Our Kin to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Desmond strikes an efficient balance between dramatizing his subjects and demonstrating his scholarly credentials.

But there’s still something missing from Desmond’s work, something whose absence ultimately hurts his argument: history. Desmond insists that Evicted “tells an American story” because its setting is indicative of the condition of many major American cities (5). But in Milwaukee history, city government has played a larger-than-average role in shaping residents' living situations. Desmond concedes that “Milwaukee used to be flush with good jobs” in the early 20th century, but neglects to mention that these conditions were created by a string of Socialist mayors who encouraged labor unions, public works and welfare programs, and who faded from the spotlight in the 1960s as white working-class voters felt threatened by Milwaukee’s growing African-American population. A deeper examination of the history of segregation in Milwaukee would also aid Desmond’s arguments about the differences between white and black renters’ experiences. But it’s also possible that I have not completely overcome my bias against sociologists.

Evicted was my first foray into sociological nonfiction, as I imagine that it was for many of the 66,954 readers who left ratings of the book on Goodreads. It probably won’t be my last. Unlike many ethnologists, Desmond chooses to remove himself from the central narrative; an afterword explains his relationships to the subjects and his role in the events of the story. When documenting an issue as large as America’s problems with urban housing, he claims, “‘I’ don’t matter” (335).

Perhaps that’s a lesson I need to take to heart. Evicted is a good book with a strong message about a big problem, and if it changes American housing for the better, I would feel nothing but pride.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Drug abuse, Drug use, Addiction, and Alcoholism

Moderate: Domestic abuse, Physical abuse, and Child abuse

Minor: Racial slurs, Suicidal thoughts, Police brutality, Mental illness, Gun violence, Grief, Death, and Child death