Parul Sehgal of The New York Times Book Review checks out “Evicted” by Mathew Desmond in NY1’s The Book Reader.

“Evicted” takes a powerful new look at poverty in America and critics are calling it a 21st century update to the classic, “How the Other Half Lives.”

The Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond has spent eight years studying what he calls an ‘epidemic of evictions.’ For many of the families he follows in the book, rent consumes up to 80 percent of their income.

Basic shelter, he finds, has become a major cause of poverty.

“Evicted” is reviewed on the cover of this week’s New York Times Book Review by Barbara Ehrenreich, who calls the book “astonishing” and praises it as a work of scholarship as well as journalism -- one that evokes the incredible cruelty in the act of eviction and a world where landlords profit off the abjection and silence of their tenants.

Evicted reveals that “poverty in America has become a lucrative business with appalling results.”