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| Eleanor Catton |
Other Books Highlights From This Year
Throughout the year, Vulture maintained a “Best Books of the Year (So Far)” list. Many of those selections appear above in our top-ten. Below, the rest of the books that stood out to them this year, presented in order of release date.
Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond
Matthew Desmond’s Evicted was a rare phenomenon: a book about the housing crisis in the U.S. and a national best seller. In the 2016 book, Desmond delivered subtle and persuasive storytelling about the struggles of a group of people in Milwaukee on the margins of society — individuals who are under constant threat of losing their homes. With his latest, Poverty, by America, Desmond has dramatically widened his canvas to take up a broader and more vexing question: Why does poverty persist in the U.S.? Desmond’s title is both a provocation and an answer. He asserts that the U.S. has chosen this predicament. Just as in Evicted, Desmond pairs his fine-tuned storytelling sensibilities with academic training to produce a book that trains our eyes on the victims of our collective failures and the forces that have made our current reality inevitable. This is a searing, essential book, and it solidifies Desmond’s status as a remarkable chronicler of our times. —T.F.
