Best Books of 2016 List

[Jason V.]

I'm starting in on the task of Christmas shopping, and looking for good books for one family member. On the Washington Post 'Best Books of 2016' list, I stumbled across this gem:

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

Dust jacket: “Evicted” immerses readers in the lives of families and individuals trapped in — or thriving off — the private-rental market for the poor, a brutal world in which landlords have all the power and tenants feel all the pain. In spare and beautiful prose, Desmond chronicles the economic and psychological devastation of substandard housing in America and the cascading misfortunes that come with losing one’s home. “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women,” he writes. “Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.” In this extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography, Desmond has made it impossible ever again to consider poverty in the United States without tackling the central role of housing.

I didn't even make it to the end of the first sentence before I, quite literally, started laughing hard enough to make my wife curious. She just stared at me after I read it to her, wondering if this was some form of satire. And I just couldn't help but share it with other folks who get the joke. 

Has anyone actually taken the time to read this thing? Is it as unhinged as it sounds? I catch some flack from people because I read a lot of business books and what are considered by most to be 'self-help' books (like I think many of us do) - but if this type of book, and the others on the list, are the state of literature these days, I think I'll just stick to my business books, and the occasional fiction or three.