There are hundreds of nonfiction and fiction books that show us what poverty looks like-Charles Dickens jumps to mind, as does Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent Dickens adaptation, Demon Copperhead. “In a nutshell, poverty persists because of a lot of us benefit. Matthew Desmond, the 43-year-old Princeton sociologist whose last book, Evicted, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, is back with another one, Poverty, by America, that’s bound to generate fruitful debate-and perhaps even inspire some of us to get off our asses and tackle this scourge once and for all. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Former President Barack Obama listed it among the favorite books he read in 2017.ĭesmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a contributing writer to The New York Times magazine.Ĭopyright 2022 The Associated Press. Besides the Pulitzer, the book received an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and a National Book Critics Circle award.

Are we - we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the lucky - somehow responsible for all this suffering?'ĭesmond's “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City' was published in 2016 and focused on eight families in an impoverished area of Milwaukee. To understand the causes of poverty, we must hold a mirror up to ourselves. “But they cannot answer the most fundamental question, which is: Why all this poverty in this land of abundance? I’ve learned that that question requires a different approach.

“Books about poverty, including ‘Evicted,’ tend to be books about the poor, tend to bear witness,” Desmond said in a statement issued Wednesday by Crown. According to Crown, Desmond will document how the wealthy harm the poor, knowingly and unknowingly. It also asks why.Ĭrown will publish “Poverty, by America” on March 21, 2023. NEW YORK (AP) - Matthew Desmond's first book since his Pulitzer Prize winning “Evicted” is not just a study of who is poor in the world's richest country.

Poverty by america desmond