An often powerful, if sometimes-chaotic, discussion of a complex topic.
An interview collection that sheds light on the experiences and systemic causes of homelessness in America.
Semjen, the director of the nonprofit Cultural Exchange Foundation, first met her co-author, Seder, while working at a men’s emergency shelter in Rockville, Maryland. Seder, a writer and director, volunteered with Semjen at the shelter’s “Voc Lab,” which provided computers and assistance in finding job listings, as well as teaching basic computer literacy to help people get online information about Medicaid, legal help, or emergency services. There, they met a diverse group, including unhoused people who were well educated, were addicted to drugs and alcohol, were convicted felons, or who had experienced physical or mental health issues. In these pages, Seder and Semjen offer their interviews with 16 men and women who have either experienced a lack of housing or have dedicated their careers to advocacy to those without homes. The editors hope that these stories will not only educate readers but also inspire lawmakers and nonprofit organizations to provide adequate funding for new programs to provide housing for all. Each interviewee gets their own chapter, which begins with a photo and short bio, followed by a Q&A. One highlight is activist George Leventhal’s interview, which focuses on his doctoral dissertation and subsequent research regarding the root causes of homelessness in the United States. His chapter places today’s homelessness crisis in historical context, and he offers a particularly astute analysis of systemic racism in his discussion of post-World War II housing opportunities denied to Black veterans. Another chapter features Aaron Howe, the co-founder of Washington, D.C.’s Remora House, which provides supplies for unhoused people.
As informative as the book’s scholarly discussions are, its greatest strength lies in the powerful testimony of those who have experienced homelessness firsthand. They include compelling stories, including those of Jennifer Speight, a single mother who was devastated by medical debt following a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in her 20s, and Jim Zidar, a professional television and film actor and theater teacher, once ranked in “the top 5% of secondary school educators,” who later became temporarily homeless after a string of “bad breaks, deteriorating health and an eviction.” A talk with Tecoy Bailey-Wade, reveals a story of childhood trauma and abuse, cocaine addiction, and a stint in prison. Other sections focus on the lives of visual artist Clifton Thompson and computer technician and Army veteran Denis Elis. An interview with Grimaldi-Francesca Sanchez, a Black trans woman, is particularly poignant in describing the discrimination she faced at both all-male and all-female shelters, highlighting the intersectionality of homelessness with race, gender, and sexuality. By emphasizing such diversity, the book challenges stereotypes that form popular narratives and obscure solutions. The interviews’ eclectic nature, however, can make for a disjointed read. A thematic reorganization of the chapters into broad categories would have made it feel better organized. That said, each interview is easy to digest, as they all retain a conversational style that will draw readers into the personal narratives.
An often powerful, if sometimes-chaotic, discussion of a complex topic.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 979-8757675107
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
