BOOK REVIEW Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

Few academic authors are as compelling as Pulitzer Prize winner Matthew Desmond. His footnotes alone are impressive, his arguments are engaging, and his data is f lawless. In 2016, Desmond was the keynote speaker at the annual National Alliance to End Homelessness conference in Washington DC, which I attended, just after the release of his best-selling book Evicted! Poverty and Profit in the American City. Desmond was at the top of his game, and his presentation was riveting. Moved by his own early childhood experiences with housing instability, Desmond now writes from a position of privilege, as a white, male faculty member at Princeton, where the average salary is over $250,000 and the teaching load is 1:1. With this level of support, his data had better be f lawless.