My mother’s brush with death started out innocuously. She had a persistent “wheezing,” and while—as the days passed by and it turned into a cough—she knew it probably should have gone away by that time, it took too much energy to catch the required two buses to visit her physician. It could wait a little longer, she reasoned.

Rural Neighborhoods, Inc., serves a community that topped the nation in well-being in a recent Gallup poll. Why? Because, Gallup found, beyond the white sand beaches and miles of golf courses, residents reported high rates of gainful employment, clean drinking water, a feeling of high personal energy and the ability to “learn and do interesting things daily.”

In an era when it seems fewer and fewer people are reading anything longer or “deeper” than social media posts and “7-reasons-to” lists, it is somewhat shocking that a 336-page, nonfiction book on evictions written by a Harvard professor would be on best-seller lists. Even Buzzfeed, the king of those easily digested list posts, heralded the new book as one of the “hottest” in 2016.