Lamar, his sons and some other adolescent boys from their Milwaukee neighborhood are sitting around, playing cards and smoking blunts, when there is a loud and confident knock on the door, which could be “a landlord’s knock, or a sheriff’s.” Mercifully it is only Colin, a young white man from their church, who has come to read them passages from the Bible, most of which Lamar knows by heart. The subject wanders off to God and the Devil, with Lamar adding, “And Earth is hell.” “Well,” Colin corrects him, “not quite hell.” An awkward silence falls.
The burden of “Evicted,” Matthew Desmond’s astonishing book, is to show that the world Lamar inhabits is indeed hell, or as close an approximation as you are likely to find in a 21st-century American city. When Lamar first looked at his two-bedroom apartment, it was an appalling mess, “with maggots sprouting from unwashed dishes in the sink,” but he tidied and cleaned it to the point of being “borderline obsessive-compulsive.” The underlying problem — or one of them — is that Lamar’s income is $628 a month, while his rent is $550, leaving $2.19 a day for the family. He does what he can to pay off part of his rent doing handyman tasks, but this is not easy for a double-amputee crawling around on his stumps, his legs having been lost to frostbite during a stint of homelessness…. [Read full review.]
Barbara Ehrenreich, The New York Times
