Poverty, by America

This is the kind of book that you finish and feel everyone needs to read. Desmond shows that poverty in America is not some unfortunate happenstance, but the result of deliberate policy choices. These choices have led to the richest nation in history having significantly higher poverty rates than any other comparable country. I particularly loved that the author highlighted the fact that the people who seem (to me) to be most likely to read this book - the affluent, the upper middle class, the highly educated - are benefactors from the same policies and systems that create a cycle of poverty in the U.S. So, if we want to eradicate poverty, we must work to tear down these systems that often unfairly benefit ourselves while further hurting the poor.