As a bonus book, his latest, Poverty, by America, also explains the larger forces that immiserate so many in the US.Ĥ. A sociologist, Desmond’s original research was groundbreaking. Housing is a basic necessity many families in the US can’t count on today because of a system that gives power to landlords and keeps low-income families trapped in a cycle of eviction. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmondĭesmond’s work on families being thrown out in the poor neighbourhoods of Milwaukee was the first glimpse many of us had at all the ways low-income families struggle to keep a roof over their heads. It explains how the US was founded explicitly as a racist system designed to keep the descendants of slaves on the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy, and all of the ways this caste system is perpetuated.ģ. This masterpiece about the US’s racial stratification is an essential book about the country’s poverty.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson Within a few years, President Lyndon B Johnson would begin rolling out his Great Society agenda to combat the destitution Harrington wrote about.Ģ. Harrington explored factories, farms, and mountain shacks to show how so many were left behind. The Other America: Poverty in the United States by Michael Harringtonįirst published in 1962, this book took a broad, structural view of how poverty persisted in the US despite the boom years after the second world war which launched many into a growing middle class.

Taken together, they illustrate an exceptionally grim truth about US society.ġ. This list is a blend of the two, the best of each sort of story. These take the focus off the individual and, at their best, explain the larger forces that can often shape our lives, whether we know it or not. The other type, equally important, takes a broad view and explains the history of American poverty as a series of policy and political choices. To write it, I returned home to my small, poor town in the Arkansas Ozarks after many years of living in big cities on the east coast to find my childhood best friend: through our reconnection, I explored the ways that the different places we lived marked our adult lives. My own book, The Forgotten Girls, follows in this tradition.

Novels and narrative nonfiction books often take a personal, sometimes painfully vivid and honest portrayal of a family or individual in a way that can personalise the potentially abstract issue for readers.

The books about poverty that resonate most for me come in two forms.

The Other America by Michael Harrington