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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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