Books like Evicted by Matthew Desmond

Justice lawyer Bryan Stevenson recounts his battle against wrongful convictions, life‑sentence juvenile cases, and systemic bias while seeking reform of America’s criminal justice system.

Zeitoun tells the true story of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun in New Orleans as they navigate the twin calamities of the war on terror and Hurricane Katrina, culminating in a dramatic arrest by armed police.

A chilling memoir detailing Solomon Northup's harrowing experience as a captive on a Louisiana plantation for twelve years, from 1841 to 1853.

A graphic biography of Benjy Melendez, a Puerto‑Rican immigrant who founded the Ghetto Brothers gang in late‑1960s New York and turned it into a force for peace, music, and cultural renewal.

High-Risers explores Chicago’s former Cabrini-Green public housing project, weaving residents’ stories with city politics and national history to examine race, class, and housing policy in the United States.

In Philadelphia’s crime‑ridden streets, a mother’s desperate search for her runaway son intersects with a world of drug dealers, run‑away teenagers and relentless violence.

An overview of Canada’s immigration history, examining the waves of settlers, the policies that shaped them, and the impact of racism and government decisions on Canadian society.

The Other Side of the River examines how a murder in Michigan’s St. Joseph River uncovers deep racial divides between the neighboring towns of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor.

Hotshot corporate lawyer Scott Fenny lives the high life in Dallas, but a controversial murder case forces him to defend a black heroin‑addicted prostitute pro bono, challenging his success, morals, and everything he holds dear.

In 1937, the famed writer and activist Upton Sinclair published a novel bearing the subtitle A Story of Ford-America. He blasted the callousness of a company worth “a billion dollars” that underpaid its workers while forcing them to engage in repetitive and sometimes dangerous assembly line labor. Eighty-three years later, the market capitalization of Amazon.com has exceeded one trillion dollars, while the value of the Ford Motor Company hovers around thirty billion. We have, it seems, entered the age of one-click America—and as the coronavirus makes Americans more dependent on online shopping, its sway will only intensify. Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated. Ranging across the country, MacGillis tells the stories of those who’ve thrived and struggled to thrive in this rapidly changing environment. In Seattle, high-paid workers in new office towers displace a historic black neighborhood. In suburban Virginia, homeowners try to protect their neighborhood from the environmental impact of a new data center. Meanwhile, in El Paso, small office supply firms seek to weather Amazon’s takeover of government procurement, and in Baltimore a warehouse supplants a fabled steel plant. Fulfillment also shows how Amazon has become a force in Washington, D.C., ushering readers through a revolving door for lobbyists and government contractors and into CEO Jeff Bezos’s lavish Kalorama mansion. With empathy and breadth, MacGillis demonstrates the hidden human costs of the other inequality—not the growing gap between rich and poor, but the gap between the country’s winning and losing regions. The result is an intimate account of contemporary capitalism: its drive to innovate, its dark, pitiless magic, its remaking of America with every click.

Biographer Jeff Hobbs traces the life of Robert Peace, a Yale student who rose from Newark’s poverty and a jailed father to academic success, illuminating the struggles of working‑class African Americans.

An investigative look into whether Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was a fluke or a lasting shift, based on field interviews across swing states and analysis of voter motivations.