The Importance Of Life In Matthew Desmond's Hillbilly Elegy

The last book that I read this summer was Evicted, by Matthew Desmond. The shines the light on the startling reality that fewer and fewer people are able to afford home ownership. Desmond writes, “Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on” (4). In the book, Desmond humanizes the eviction process and tells the story of 8 families from the eyes of the landlord and the tenant. Desmond shows the landlord’s thought process and how they are forced to survive relying on the payment of others, and Desmond shows the tenant’s struggle in order scrounge up enough money for rent whilen dealing with

Evicted by Matthew Desmond is a novel that tells the stories of families struggling to pay the rent in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In this book, just like Missoula, the stories are intertwined with each other. So far the stories have followed two landlords: Sherrena Tarver and Tobin Charney. Sheerena owns property all over the predominantly black north side of Milwaukee. She is strong and caring, but I think she is not fair to her tenants.

5 Causes Of A Dysfunctional Family The author of “Into The Wild” John Krakauer shares part of the story of a young man named Chris McCandless about how he gave up everything to hitchhike to Alaska. The important question that people would ask is what made him leave everything to go to Alaska? John Krauer shared a bit of why Chris left which was due to family drama. Two decades later Carine McCandless, Chris's sister, wrote a book called “The Wild Truth'' to share the personal struggles she and Chris went through to find their own truth in different ways.

James was the pastor of one of the largest African-American churches in their town. The family’s friendship with the Raglans was inspiring and opened up many doors across racial lines. Displacement in this essay was defined as being in a culture

Life started to change for Moore as he experienced his father collapse and die because of a misdiagnosis of epiglottitis, forcing his family to relocate and move in with his grandparents in the Bronx. The Bronx is known for increased poverty, dropout rates, violence, drugs, weapons, and so on making it difficult for one to access legitimate opportunities for success. Moore’s grandparents gave very strict rules to Moore along with his mother picking up additional jobs for Moore to go to a wealthier private white school compared to a poor minority public school. Throughout his experience Moore felt like an outcast between the white rich kids and his friends around his neighborhood, making him lose motivation in school and his grades beginning to drop. Shortly after he tagged a building with his friend Shea and accidentally hitting his sister Moore’s mom and grandparents used a lot of their savings to send Moore to Valley Forge, a military school, where he revitalized himself, forming himself into a man of new purpose, goals, opportunities, and life.

In the Academy Award winning film Ordinary People the story focuses on the Jarrett family who has recently suffered the loss of a son and they slowly become dysfunctional as a family. The mother Beth Jarrett becomes very distant after the loss of her son Buck and struggles maintaining a relationship with her surviving son Conrad. Calvin, the father, struggles to also connect with his depressed son Conrad while trying to connect with his distant wife. Meanwhile Conrad, the surviving son, becomes very depressed and suicidal. The end result is major dysfunctionality in the family and it is very apparent that the Jarrett family is in need of a crucial conversation to manage the conflict.

Many sharecroppers tried to escape from their place of work because they wanted a better life for themselves, while others felt content with getting short-changed by the white man. This notion of self-help and self-improvement began in James’ family with his great-great-uncle, Oscar Gaines, when he escaped his duties as a young laborer in Savannah, GA. Oscar managed to find a job chopping cotton for a white man who was not bothered by his skin color (McBride 45). The story of old Oscar Gaines would surface for generations to come in the Gaines/Brown family as a story of courage and self-improvement. While James Brown’s father Joe did his best to take care of his son, he could not raise him all alone.

Sherrena is a landlord in 'Evicted' by Matthew Desmond, she is world class American Landlord. Before she was a fourth-grade teacher then she decided to specialize in black poor neighborhoods where "she owned thirty-six units, all in the inner city," (13). Due to the fact she owned so much property, Sherrena had her own rules/opportunities. One of those rules/ opportunities was that tenants could do an odd job for the property they were living in if they wanted to prevent an eviction for not making rent payments. Lamar is one the Tenants that takes advantage of this opportunity because he doesn't have a stable income, has no legs and receives no financial assistance for his disability.

In the midst of all of this he finds a balance by focusing on what really matters. At the same time this keeps him focused on his main goal which is education. Education will be his family's way out of poverty. Through seeing his younger brother that is unemployed and will be having a child soon he looks beyond this and is genuinely proud of where he comes from. He realizes how strong his family is when he seems them fighting through poverty and making things.

In the novel, Findley negates the idea of the nuclear family and showing real life family dynamics. Through out the novel, the struggles the characters endure help teens relate to struggles

As a young boy, James had a very happy life with his siblings and his parents until his father left the family without notice. James’s mother remarried twice and this put the household in an

The impoverished conditions in which the residents of this community live are difficult based on the surrounding violence and discrimination they face. Tre, Ricky’s best friend, is able to survive the surrounding violence and discrimination through his father’s sensational leadership; he therefore knows what to do in situations he faces among his friends. However, his friends are not so lucky. For example, Dough doesn’t have great leadership or a father figure, but is raised by a single mother who is determined to get her children to succeed; nevertheless, her main focus is Ricky because he has the most potential; he is an

He speaks about the story of Clyde Ross, a black man who fled horrible conditions in Mississippi to find work in Chicago. Like many Americans Ross dreamed of owning a home. However, the only way for a black person to buy a home in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century was to buy from predatory “contract” sellers who charged unbillable rates with few legal protections for buyers. Clyde said “To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, I took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza.” Like many blacks in Chicago at the time he got two jobs just to keep up with the payments of the house, overall being kept away from his

Matthew Desmond’s Evicted takes a sociological approach to understanding the low-income housing system by following eight families as they struggle for residential stability. The novel also features two landlords of the families, giving the audience both sides and allowing them to make their own conclusions. Desmond goes to great lengths to make the story accessible to all classes and races, but it seems to especially resonate with people who can relate to the book’s subjects or who are liberals in sound socioeconomic standing. With this novel, Desmond hopes to highlight the fundamental structural and cultural problems in the evictions of poor families, while putting faces to the housing crisis. Through the lens of the social reproduction theory, Desmond argues in Evicted that evictions are not an effect of poverty, but rather, a cause of it.

It is very important that parents exist in the life of their children, support them, and be a good role model for them. Parents that are not emotionally involved in the lives of their children tend to have kids that cannot find themselves in life and struggle from lack of attention. Lack of parent’s attention and impossibility to find herself is exactly what happens with Connie. Her father does not take part in the family’s life at all.