A searching, troubling look at the terrible actualities of homelessness.
Noted long-form journalist Kidder rides along as clinicians try to serve one of Boston’s most marginalized populations.
The term rough sleeper is not used much in American English. It’s a borrowing from the British way of describing the people who sleep where sleep is not intended: doorways, sidewalks, culverts, etc. Kidder’s hero, Dr. James Joseph O’Connell, has spent decades with volunteer and paid workers driving in a medicine- and supply-stuffed van to the places where this population gathers. Many of the rough sleepers are mentally ill or addicts. Most are White, perhaps because, as O’Connell ventures, “the Black and Latino communities are more willing than Boston’s white world to harbor their homeless.” In any event, “once people have fallen to living on the streets, they have reached a certain horrible equality.” Against the work of O’Connell and his Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program stand an array of bureaucrats and the police, who regularly roust the homeless from their camps and nooks, forcing them to find even less hospitable places to survive the night. O’Connell, now well past retirement age, is the tutelary angel of the piece, but many lesser heroes work around the clock to save lives and treat the downtrodden with dignity. The job is thankless and endless. As O’Connell’s mentor told him, “We’re way down on the solution scale,” and indeed, finding a solution to homelessness is a sociological and economic problem more than a medical one. For all that, said one worker, O’Connell keeps on trying: “This is really about accountability, system design, performance. Until that’s fixed, Jim is basically standing at the bottom of a cliff, trying to save people.” Sometimes he succeeds, but too often, for reasons institutional and personal, some people can’t and won’t be saved, and many who can be will slip between the cracks.
A searching, troubling look at the terrible actualities of homelessness.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-984801-43-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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