A gripping combination of haunting photos and plangent stories full of almost unbearably raw humanity.
The faces and voices of people living on the street are revealed in intimate detail in this searing collection of photographs and interviews.
For her fourth volume of literary-pictorial studies of homelessness, den Bok photographed street people in Toronto; Washington, D.C.; and Brisbane, Australia, while her father, Tim, asked questions about their lives and hardships, all in exchange for a $10 payment. Some of their hard-luck narratives have a picaresque specificity: Bill faced eviction because creditors seized his bank account; Ken went bankrupt four times because of his business partners’ drug addictions, a malicious prosecution, and a perfidious woman; Vaughan, an electrician, was homeless by choice because it was cheap and he disliked working. A few people are totally opaque—“Rick seems to be almost completely nonverbal, communicating more with grunts than with words”—while others recall a hazy rut of misfortune, substance abuse, and mental illness. The author’s subjects are articulate about the travails of homelessness, discussing in detail the pitfalls of shelter systems where fighting, theft, and bedbugs are rampant; strategies for surviving Toronto’s frigid winters—find a steam grate to camp over—and the havoc that Covid-19 lockdowns wrought on public bathroom access. (“They wouldn’t even let me use the emergency washrooms” at a hospital, complains Dana. “I was basically treated like an animal.”) Emotional deprivations are just as bitter: Many people talk of their loneliness and estrangement from relatives and of the hole in the heart left by a child they cannot see.
Den Bok’s black-and-white portraits—extreme close-ups that highlight caked dirt and every spike of stubble—are arresting. They include aging King Lears who sport unkempt beards and wild white hair, with one pointing an accusing finger pistol-style at the camera; women with pleading eyes, their creased, spotted faces a road map of wrong turns; and younger men shrouded in blankets and hoodies, half-seen and menacing. Her renditions of her subjects’ conversations seem artless, but in fact she deftly arranges their ramblings into telling evocations of their characters and predicaments. Their soliloquies are sometimes sheer madness—“I fought against Hitler….I fought in Canada because most of it was Chinese….I was a five-star general, a fifteen-star general”—and at other times prosaic accounts of the chaos of mere poverty. (“So, um, I moved to Brampton, and the landlord ended up, ah, screwing over all the tenants, and, ah, he ended up getting a written notice but didn’t tell us tenants, and, ah, we all ended up on the streets on, ah, Christmas.”) Often, they meet in the middle, where people dimly recognize the roles their misfiring behaviors played in their blighted lives. (“I’m, ah…I try to get off the streets,” says Mary Ellen. “I try every day now. Yeah, I…you know, when I was…I don’t know what I’m doing. But mostly in the summer I…I don’t know if it’s some sort of drug I got into….I’m getting into fights every other day.”) Yet as extreme as their circumstances and dysfunctions are, den Bok’s subjects voice yearnings—says Cory of his 13-year-old daughter, “I’d like to see her. I haven’t been having much luck….Oh well! Things are getting better. Things will always get better”—that readers will find heartbreakingly familiar.
A gripping combination of haunting photos and plangent stories full of almost unbearably raw humanity.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-1220114752
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Europe Books
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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