《Evicted》是一本由Matthew Desmond著作，Crown出版的Hardcover图书，本书定价：USD 28.00，页数：432，文章吧小编精心整理的一些读者的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。
刚不久宣布的今年普利策奖获奖名单。四月基本在读非虚构类书籍。选择这本获奖作品非虚构类。Evicted用讲故事的方式描写美国的贫困问题。这本书也是《纽约时报》评出2016最佳10本书之一。贫困问题像dirty laundry，一般大家避而不谈。记得几年前普利策奖摄影师Peter曾在我们学校做过演讲，送他回酒店途中经过深圳城中村，我说这是深圳的另一面，他说哪里都有，纽约也这样。（Set in Milwaukee, Desmond's book was among a wave of works that explored poverty, race and the class divide, themes that had special resonance as Republican Donald Trump ）查了一下报道：美国贫富不均日趋严重，在书中提到的Milwaukee，一半的人口在经济上挣扎，其中2015年贫困线下人口达到34%。历史上60年代这里是种族隔离最严重的城市之一。在BBC看过类似的报道，Trump能获选成功不是意外，是有现实感。只不过大家都是后知后觉。post truth（The study, by the Economic Innovation Group, found the gap between the richest and poorest American communities widening, and ranked Milwaukee the seventh most distressed city in America, with 52% of the population considered economically distressed.）
《Evicted》读后感(二)：Caring for the poor
I have to say, this book is written with great love and compassion. In Chinese, there's a word called'赤子之心', and it's completely for the author, who has deep love for the country and truely sympathy for the poor. In ancient China, he may have been one of the great poets to reveal the society problems, but in mordern American, he try to analyse and solve the problems in a more socientific way.
The books tells stories between tenants and landlords in Milwaukee, or maybe mainly the tenants, who belongs to the poor. And they are binded up with the process of eviction. That's how the author cut into the problems.
efore beeing evicted, the poor people mainly the black already lived a miserable life. The books also writes what their life used to be and how they got into such conditions. And not only the life of the tenant, but also everything about how their children, spouses, parents, friends, nighbours lives. As obviously, their life is no more better than the tenants. Take for an example, one man lost his feet just because of snow coldness and another middle class nurse man lost his license, house and everything and lives like walking trash just because at first his additciton to pain killer leads him to drugs. It's hard to image such things happened to people, but it's real life and they just happened.
And then, they were not only abandoned by the socity, but also the landlords. No job and not enough assurance money from goverment leads their evictions. The book followed how they were evicted and what happens during their eviction. It try to ask if the law protected them or the landlords and how the eviction records will affected their rent life after.
As time goes on, now new house searching journey beigins. Public house service is always responding with waiting in line status. When it's their turn, it may have passed 5 years averagely. So going for landlords directly is the most common way for the poor black. In fact, the net profit from the poor's rent is much higher than from the middle class. Even though, when they begin to find a new house, they may have dailed 50 landlords to beg for a new house. Undre such condition, they have no bargin with the landlord.
That's how the poverty happeded with all the eviction process circles on. Life still remains hard. So if there is no hope in life, that's how the poor behave, they feel themselves with no pride, lives in rubbish, try to satisfy themselves at any moment, are selfish and cold hearted. If someone still is trying to be nice, life will fuck him up and say no. That's when they may think whatever happens can the life be any worser. All in one, It's miserable to be poor and man has right not live in misery because of lack of basic living need.
If the books stops here, it may not be that great. The author widden his survey to more cities. When the author knows the facts, he finds where the laws flaws and solutions come out from laws. Also it draws attention to the society, so more and more people get involved to fix the poor rent problems. All the society should and begin to work on it. That's how great books should work. Well done!
In China, there are similar books like <出梁庄记> by lianghong.
Man's civilization is based on caring for the poor.
《Evicted》读后感(三)：Oh this vulnerable and ingenue world (这个脆弱又诡诈的世界）
社会田野研究者有冷静的眼睛和冷静的头脑。他们讲故事，总是只记录，只述说，只指向社会现状。读着又丧又停不下来；又觉得合理又觉得难过。比如Pam（p.49）生活在一个贩毒的家庭。她洁身自好，勉力为生，直到有一天一通电话告诉她—她的弟弟死了。在看接下来这一段的时候，我想到了很多（比如高塔奇人S1E7）:
The words to describe the drug--"crack", "rock"--gave off the impression that it was a gnarled, craggy thing. But when you held it in your hand, it could be smooth and elegant. It could look like a piece of Chiclets gum, the kind that slides into a child's cupped hand out of the quarter-turn machine. All those years with the drug dealer, Pam had stayed away from it. But she also saw the way it helped people forget. "There was not a day that went by that I wasn't fucked up on something," Pam remembered. "And sometimes I'd be like, 'Wow. I haven't even cried for him yet.' But I didn't. Before I would, I'd go and get high."
人好像是被俘虏的囚犯，又好像是主动跳入网罗的小兽；看似自我选择了最好的解决方式，却被罪牢笼，越陷越深越深...从这个角度看，这本书只是把人放在一个极端恶劣的小空间里，暴露人里面怀有期待的前途无量和不肯承认的前途无望。
最近又是在经历生活的转折点。虽然远没有这本书里冰冷到不动声色，可以遥遥往前看，却也好像突然看不到下一个起点（更不要说终点）。但人的处境哪有什么二般。没有人是一座孤岛，没有人渴望做一个被驱逐者，没有人不希望自己在找寻家的路上，深知自己拥有一个真正的家。图书馆催着还书，有时间，有时间一定会把这本书读完。算是对这个曾经向往的“天上之国”的追悼吧。
注：题目来自p5: Eviction reveals people's vulnerability and desperation, as well as their ingenuity and guts.
《Evicted》读后感(四)：转自The Guardian 4月7日Evicted by Matthew Desmond – what if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitab
Katha Pollitt
What if the dominant discourse on poverty is just wrong？ What if the problem isn’t that poor people have bad morals – that they’re lazy and impulsive and irresponsible and have no family values – or that they lack the skills and smarts to fit in with our shiny 21st-century economy？ What if the problem is that poverty is profitable？ These are the questions at the heart of Evicted, Matthew Desmond’s extraordinary ethnographic study of tenants in low-income housing in the deindustrialised middle-sized city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
You might not think that there is a lot of money to be extracted from a dilapidated trailer park or a black neighbourhood of “sagging duplexes, fading murals, 24-hour daycares”. But you would be wrong. Tobin Charney makes $400,000 a year out of his 131 trailers, some of which are little better than hovels. Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher who is one of the only black female landlords in the city, makes enough in rents on her numerous properties – some presentable, others squalid – to holiday in Jamaica and attend conferences on real estate.
Desmond follows the intertwined fortunes of eight families and a host of minor characters. Arleen Belle and Doreen Hinkston are black mothers clinging to the edge of low-wage employment; Crystal and Trisha are fragile young black women whose upbringing was violent and chaotic; Lamar is a genial black father of two who lost both his legs to frostbite when he passed out on crack in an abandoned house; Scott is a white male nurse who lost his licence when he stole opioids from his patients; Larraine, also white, is a slightly brain-damaged sweet soul. It is sometimes a little hard to keep up with the storylines as they weave in and out of the text, but no matter. What is important is that Desmond takes people who are usually seen as worthless – there is even a trailer-dweller nicknamed Heroin Susie – and shows us their full humanity, how hard they struggle to retain their dignity, humour and kindness in conditions that continually drag them down.
The main condition holding them back, Desmond argues, is rent. The standard measure is that your rent should be no more than 30% of your income, but for poor people it can be 70% or more. After he paid Sherrena his $550 rent out of his welfare cheque, Lamar had only $2.19 a day for the month. When he is forced to repay a welfare cheque he has been sent in error and falls behind on rent, he sells his food stamps for half their face value and volunteers to paint an upstairs apartment, but it is not enough. People such as Lamar live in chronic debt to their landlord, who can therefore oust them easily whenever it is convenient – if they demand repairs, for example, like Doreen, or if a better tenant comes along. Sherrena liked renting to the clients of a for-profit agency that handles – for a fee – the finances of people on disability payments who can’t manage on their own. Money from government programmes intended to help the poor – welfare, disability benefits, the earned-income tax credit – go straight into the landlord’s pocket and, ironically, fuel rising housing costs. Public housing and housing vouchers are scarce. Three in four who qualify for housing assistance get nothing.
Even in the Great Depression, evictions used to be rare. Now, each year, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of renters are put out on the street. Even a paid-up tenant can be easily evicted. Arleen loses one apartment when her son Jori throws a snowball at a passing car and the enraged driver kicks in the front door, and another when the police come after Jori when he kicks a teacher and runs home. Any kind of trouble that brings the police can lead to eviction, which means women can lose their homes if they call 911 when their man beats them up. Think about that the next time someone asks why women don’t call the cops on violent partners.
As Desmond shows, the main victims of eviction are women. Why？ They are paid less than men for doing the same job. They are less able to make deals with their landlord, who is almost always a man, to work off part of their rent with manual labour. The main reason, though, is that women are raising children as single mothers. They not only have all the costs and burdens of childrearing, they need bigger apartments – which, since landlords dislike renting to families with young children, are harder to find and a lot harder to keep. Other sociologists – Kathryn Edin, for example – have found that single mothers often get help under the table from their children’s fathers, but Arleen, Doreen and Doreen’s adult daughter Patrice get mostly trouble from men, who are variously abusive, addicted, vanished or in prison. In one of the book’s many small sad moments, Arleen claims she receives child support in order to seem more stable and respectable to a prospective landlord. In fact, she gets nothing.
Desmond lays out the crucial role housing plays in creating and reinforcing white privilege. In Milwaukee, one of the most segregated cities in the US, all black people suffer from housing discrimination and all white people benefit at least a little from the racial dividend – a landlord who will rent to them but not to black people, for instance, or offer them a nicer apartment. Black people have the worst housing in the worst neighbourhoods – the great fear of the trailer-park people, who are all white, is that they will end up on the black side of town. Eviction hits black women hardest of all, and the bleak benches of housing courts, which deal with disputes between landlords and tenants, are full of black women and their children: “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighbourhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”
What are the social costs of eviction？ It puts incredible stress on families. It prevents people from saving the comparatively small sums that would let them stabilise their situation. They are always starting over from scratch, losing their possessions in the chaos of removal, or putting them in storage and losing them when they can’t pay the fees. An eviction on your record makes the next apartment harder to get. Eviction damages children, who are always changing schools, giving up friends and toys and pets – and living with the exhaustion and depression of their parents. We watch Jori go from a sweet, protective older brother to an angry, sullen boy subject to violent outbursts who is falling way behind in school.
Eviction makes it hard to keep up with the many appointments required by the courts and the byzantine welfare system: several characters have their benefits cut because notices are sent to the wrong address. Eviction destroys communities: when people move frequently, they don’t form the social bonds and pride in place that encourage them to care for their block and look out for their neighbours. “With Doreen’s eviction, Thirty-Second Street lost a steadying presence – someone who loved and invested in the neighbourhood, who contributed to making the block safer – but Wright Street didn’t gain one.”
“There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land,” Desmond writes in his conclusion. That is easy to say, and many books by journalists and academics have done so. By examining one city through the microscopic lens of housing, however, he shows us how the system that produces that pain and poverty was created and is maintained. I can’t remember when an ethnographic study so deepened my understanding of American life.
《Evicted》读后感(五)：有感情色彩的动词
1. Grandmothers watched from porch chairs as black boys laughingly made their way to the basketball court.
2. Sherrena wound her way through the North side, listening to R&B with her window down.
《Evicted》读后感(六)：《被驱逐者》简介翻译
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
《被驱逐者：美国城市的贫穷与利益》
Matthew Desmond
在这本精彩却令人心碎的书中，Matthew Desmond带我们进入了美国密尔沃基市最贫穷的社区，讲述了8个在绝境边缘的家庭的故事。Arleen是一位单身母亲，在为摇摇欲坠的破公寓缴纳房租后，每个月只剩下20美金养活自己和两个儿子；Scott是一位善良的护士，却毒瘾缠身；Lamar是一个没有腿的男人，却要照顾整个社区的男孩，试图努力工作摆脱债务；Vanetta的工时被减少后不得不参与一起抢劫案。所有人都将自己几乎所有的收入花在房租上，却被这个社会远远地甩在后面。
这些家庭的命运都掌握在两个地主的手里：Sherrena Tarver从前是一名教师，后转行投资贫民区房产；Tobin Charney则经营着密尔沃基最差的拖车公园。他们憎恶一些房客，喜欢另一些，但Sherrena说：“光有爱付不了账单。”圣诞前夕，她将Arleen和她的两个儿子驱逐出了公寓。
驱逐（收回租地）曾经是很罕见的，哪怕是在美国城市中最荒凉的区域。但今天，许多贫穷的租户要将他们收入的一半以上花在房租上，且驱逐变得非常普遍，单身母亲是最常见的驱逐对象。Desmond用生动的文字向我们呈现了今日美国面临的最迫切的问题之一。我们看见一些家庭不得不住进避难所、肮脏的房屋、充满危险的社区，这意味着我们正亲眼见证着美国社会中巨大不平等的人性代价，也见证了人们在面对艰难时所展现出的决心和智识。
本书以多年的田野调查和大量数据为基础，为解决一个灾难性的、独特的美国问题提出了新的观点，它将改变我们对极度贫穷和经济剥削的理解。书中所描绘的希望与失去会让我们重新认识到“家”的重要——离开了家，一切都是不可能的。
Matthew Desmond is an American sociologist and urban ethnographer. He is currently the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Co-Director of the Justice and Poverty Project. The author of several books, including the award-winning book, "On the Fireline," and "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," Desmond was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" grant in 2015 for his work on poverty in America.