A lucid and scathing explanation for one of our nation’s abiding injustices.

It’s brave, in a way, that Desmond has chosen such a different approach for his bracing new book.

A compact jeremiad on the persistence of extreme want in a nation of extraordinary wealth, a distillation into argument form of the message embedded within the narrative of Evicted.

Provocative and compelling.

Desmond’s new book, Poverty, By America, casts a wider net and embodies a different tone. It’s a data-driven manifesto that turns a critical eye on those who inflict and perpetuate unlivable conditions on others, and implores them to help wipe out a catastrophe they’ve prolonged for far too long.

Lively.

Readers expecting more of the rich narrative texture of [Evicted] will be disappointed. Unlike Evicted, which was grounded in years of fieldwork, Desmond’s new book contains little in the way of original ethnographic research and, though it has its share of startling statistics, lacks a vivid cast of characters. Working in a very different register, Desmond instead offers a passionate and provocative argument fueled by his dismay about the extent of poverty in America—and by his dissatisfaction with conventional explanations for how little has changed.

Desmond takes a darker view.

He rounds up some of the usual suspects, such as Republicans and bankers. At the same time, he reserves a lot of blame for his peers, the kind of people who are likely to buy his book.

He...proceeds to describe, in sometimes harrowing detail, the hardships of American poverty and to advance his own explanation for poverty’s persistence.

Ambitious.

Desmond is a Princeton sociology professor whose previous book, Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city, won a Pulitzer prize. So perhaps it’s not surprising that so many readers are eager to discover all the ways in which they are complicit in America’s scandalous levels of poverty and destitution. Still, it’s a little shocking to realize that the bien pensant upper middle classes who care about the poor, and form the target audience for this book, are among the people the author holds responsible for the problem.

Brilliantly researched and artfully written.

Desmond makes a convincing argument that poverty is a sinkhole too powerful for anyone to pull themselves out by their bootstraps alone.

Desmond wants to connect — and create a causal relationship between — omnipresent poverty and all of the ways in which the well-to-do are subsidized. It is not, in Desmond’s telling, the government or multinational corporate monopolies that produce and reproduce poverty: rather, it owes to a myriad of interchanges, scalable from an everyday cheap product bought without care for the worker, to a tax break exclusively for homeowners. What truly entrenches poverty is the exchange between those with and those without.

Thoughtful.