I am an anthropologist and studied homelessness in Paris and London for the last decade. I was drawn into the world of people on the streets when I moved to London and started observing their parallel world. I spent almost a year with people on the street in London and two years in Paris. I volunteered in day centers, safe injection facilities, and soup kitchens and slept in a homeless shelter. Since I finished my first book on my observations in Paris, I have advised both policymakers on homelessness and written countless journalistic articles. My goal is always to provide a clearer picture of homelessness through the eyes of the people themselves.
I wrote
Making Better Lives: Hope, Freedom and Home-Making among People Sleeping Rough in Paris
I met Matthew Desmond before he became one of the youngest Professors with his own center at Princeton University. He was visiting London, had just published his first book, and was still finishing the research for this book.
Desmond did an enormous amount of field research; he spent months living in a trailer park, on top of thousands of hours in archives and courtrooms where eviction cases are decided. The result is the best book I have ever read about poverty.
What happens when ‘normal people’ get evicted? Desmond’s story is rich and personal, and that is what we need: we need to understand the lives of poor people better in order to finally decide that we must change the systems that put them there.
*WINNER OF THE 2017 PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION* 'Beautifully written, thought-provoking, and unforgettable ... If you want a good understanding of how the issues that cause poverty are intertwined, you should read this book' Bill Gates, Best Books of 2017
Arleen spends nearly all her money on rent but is kicked out with her kids in Milwaukee's coldest winter for years. Doreen's home is so filthy her family call it 'the rat hole'. Lamar, a wheelchair-bound ex-soldier, tries to work his way out of debt for his boys. Scott, a nurse turned addict, lives in a gutted-out trailer. This is…
This book is a story about gangs in Chicago and one woman’s personal involvement in researching them. It is a sad book but also one full of surprises, family stories, and romance.
I learnt so much about what it means to be black and poor today. Goffman was as closely involved as was possible for a white, female grad student and pushed the boundaries of what good journalism and research needs to do today.
Bourgois’ and Schonberg’s accounts opened up the ‘parallel world’ of homelessness for me and inspired me to do my own research on homelessness.
They spent years trying to understand people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, following them on their daily journeys through institutions and city landscapes; they intimately understood their struggles, from mental health and addiction to systematic exclusion.
Their long, in-depth, and grassroots accounts of people on the street made me grasp their varied experiences for the first time.
This powerful study immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug addiction in the contemporary United States. For over a decade Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network of two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers on the streets of San Francisco, accompanying them as they scrambled to generate income through burglary, panhandling, recycling, and day labor. "Righteous Dopefiend" interweaves stunning black-and-white photographs with vivid dialogue, detailed field notes, and critical theoretical analysis. Its gripping narrative develops a cast of characters around the themes of violence, race relations, sexuality, family trauma, embodied suffering, social inequality, and…
I hadn’t encountered any good stories about the current opioid epidemic before reading this book. A contemporary re-write of Dicken’s David Copperfield, this book faces it all: being an orphan, being pushed around in the care system, struggling in school, sliding into addiction.
I love how Kingsolver’s powerful fictional account makes a little bit more concrete what so many people in America and beyond are going through right now. This story is devastating, and there is no happy ending, but that is also the case for many of the real people currently struggling with addiction.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
When I moved to London, I started noticing the ‘underground economy’ that happens on the big city’s sidewalks. When I read Venkatesh’s account of exactly this economy of sellers, hustlers, buskers, and people who beg in New York, I was hooked.
Right there, where we walk and shop ourselves, there are people living a parallel life. Sometimes, our lives overlap, but mostly we stay unconnected. This separation, our ‘looking away,’ is where the problems start.
In this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighbourhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate, dangerous and remarkable ways in which a community survives. We find there an entire world of unregulated, unreported, and untaxed work, a system of living off the books that is daily life in the ghetto. From women who clean houses and prepare lunches for the local hospital to small-scale entrepreneurs like the mechanic who works in an alley; from the preacher who provides mediation services to the salon owner who rents her store out for gambling parties; and…
How do people who are on the streets, sleeping rough, survive? What kind of tactics do they employ to make lives and build homes while homeless?
Based on two years spent on the streets of Paris, my book provides an in-depth view of the lives of a group of twenty people experiencing homelessness. You will be drawn into the daily practices of begging and shelter making; you will accompany me and the homeless people I made friends with in day centers, rehab facilities, and safe injection facilities. You will learn how these people who are extremely marginalised and pushed to the very limits of human existence still find hope and look forward.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
