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Overview
"It must be some kind of experiment or something, to see how long people can live without food, without shelter, without security."-homeless woman, Grand Central Station, winter"Homelessness is a routine fact of life on the margins. Materially, it emerges out of a tangled but unmysterious mix of factors: scarce housing, poorly planned and badly implemented policies of relocation and support, dismal prospects of work, exhausted or alienated kin. . . . Any outreach worker could tell you that list would be incomplete without one more: how misery can come to prefer its own company."-from the bookKim Hopper has dedicated his career to trying to correct the problem of homelessness in the United States. In his powerful book, he draws upon his dual strengths as anthropologist and advocate to provide a deeper understanding of the roots of homelessness. He also investigates the complex attitudes brought to bear on the issue since his pioneering fieldwork with Ellen Baxter twenty years ago helped put homelessness on the public agenda.Beginning with his own introduction to the problem in New York, Hopper uses ethnography, literature, history, and activism to place homelessness into historical context and to trace the process by which homelessness came to be recognized as an issue. He tells the largely neglected story of homelessness among African Americans and vividly portrays various sites of public homelessness, such as airports. His accounts of life on the streets make for powerful reading.Editorials
From the Publisher
"Part ethnography, part memoir; part chronicle, part social analysis; and-reversing the author's own characterization-decidedly more poetry than plumbing, Reckoning with Homelessness weaves scholarship, fieldwork, and advocacy into an elegant accounting and a plain good read. Hopper offers a rare and valuable behind-the-scenes look at the intellectual career of an applied anthropologist. The book is a must not only for students of homelessness but also for those with a broader interest in how anthropology happens."-Norma Ware, Harvard Medical SchoolKim Hopper takes us on several intertwined journeys that stimulate new ways of thinking about homelessness, social policy, advocacy, and anthropology. His book offers recent history, challenging analyses of why we have homelessness and prospects for its elimination, and reflections on the accomplishments and challenges of advocacy. In addition, his book reveals an anthropologist at work, adapting and adopting methods, insight, and self to the undersides of the often ugly but surprisingly resilient urban world of the streets.-Martha R. Burt, Urban Institute, Washington DC
"In its poetic sensibility, passion, and political purpose, Kim Hopper's tale of homelesness in the United States rivals George Orwell's classic account of unemployment in pre-war Britain. Based on more than 20 years' research and advocacy for those who learn to survive on almost nothing, this is an ethnography told with humility and eloquence."-Shirley Lindenbaum, CUNY Graduate Center
"As an anthropologist of and advocate for the homeless' he co-founded the New York and national Coalitions for the Homeless-Kim Hopper has an unusual dual take on the crisis. . . . Hopper's is research with a human face."-Washington Post Book World, Sunday, April 6, 2003
"A frequently cited authority on the subject, . . . Hopper is well versed in public policy efforts and has distinctive views about their efficacy-or lack thereof. His impassioned arguments for reimagined efforts to address the plight of the homeless cannot be ignored. Recommended for research and special libraries and for larger public libraries."-Library Journal, March 15, 2003
"Hopper continues to push the envelope in the study of homelessness and, by extension, in the field of anthropology and on all fronts of the endeavor - theory, method, and politics. His work contains instances of brilliance as he offers his rich insight on the whole enterprise of poverty, homelessness, and contemporary citizenship. . . . Hopper challenges himself, his discipline, our collective social world, and each one of us to go beyond our moral witnessing to engaged advocacy and political action. Summing Up: Highly Recommended. All libraries."-Choice, November 2003
For more than 20 years Hopper has probed the scope and causes of homelessness. He possesses the fine touch of an ethnographer. . . . He has a novelist's knack of evoking lives of gritty substance. But he also has a scientist's desire to know . . . and provides us an unusually rich 'thick description' of the phenomenon."-America, June 9-16, 2003
"One might wonder, with more than seven hundred books on the topic of homelessness already in print, whether there is anything left to say. Kim Hopper's Reckoning with Homelessness makes it plain that there is plenty left to say, that the last chapter in this sad, sorry history is still forthcoming. . . . It has to be among the best-written, most elegantly expressed works of urban anthropology ever. . . . Hopper's ethnographic ramble through the makeshift haunts of the world's richest city is inevitably ironic, bitterly painful, unfailingly informative. . . . For most people most of the time, it is kith and kin who 'ease the bite of misfortune,' and only when these support networks fail is homelessness the result. Social dislocation, not individual pathology, lies at the heart of the problem."-James D. Wright, University of Central Florida, Social Service Review 77:4