Dear Great Book Guru,  Last weekend I was at opening day of Sea Cliff Baseball rooting for my favorite team “The Artful Dodgers” when I overheard a heated discussion of a new book about widespread injustices in America.  I would love to learn more but didn’t catch the title.  Any idea?                            

  Fan of Sea Cliff Baseball

Dear Fan,  Yes, I was part of  that discussion and the book is EVICTED by Matthew Desmond. Desmond, a young sociologist, writes about eight families living in Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhood. We learn in exquisite detail the struggles these families endure as they face seemingly insurmountable odds.   The cumulative effect for the reader is shame and horror.  We read of a single mother paying 80% of her $628 income in rent; failing to pay this rent, she is evicted during a brutal Wisconsin winter.  A father  struggling to care for his young children is evicted after three 911 calls trigger “a nuisance citation” and, yes- the calls were because of his son’s asthma attacks. The book focuses on two points:  that growing numbers of low income families are paying astonishing shares of their income for rent  and secondly, evictions aren’t a result of poverty but a cause, resulting in job losses, school absences, illness… To lose one’s home, the author discovers is often to lose everything- your possessions, your job, your children,  your future.  These evicted families  enter into Dante’s inferno- “abandon all hope,  you who enter here.” Highly recommended!