Reviews tagging 'Pregnancy'

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

15 reviews

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

lily1304's review against another edition

informative sad medium-paced

4.5

Honestly this was a brilliant ethnography - people don't take sociology seriously as a field of research, but this is an example of why they should! Personal stories hit home more than impersonal statistics, but Desmond cites plenty of research too to back up the stories he records.

Do not skip the epilogue and afterword about his research methods!

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Addiction, Alcohol, Drug abuse, Drug use, Fire/Fire injury, Mental illness, Racial slurs, and Racism

Moderate: Child death, Death, Domestic abuse, Grief, Pregnancy, and Violence

Descriptions of eviction, homelessness, hunger, and poverty

junefish's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racial slurs, Racism, Drug abuse, Addiction, and Domestic abuse

Moderate: Xenophobia, Ableism, Animal death, Cursing, Drug use, Alcoholism, and Sexism

Minor: Vomit, Toxic friendship, Suicidal thoughts, Sexual content, Pregnancy, and Police brutality

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