A rare look at citizens often denied their dignity.
Putting a face on people who don’t have homes.
The homeless epidemic afflicts every American city, and yet San Francisco has often been designated by the national news media as the homeless capital of America. After all, as veteran San Francisco Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan writes, “If you have to be homeless, there’s no better place than San Francisco. This is where the booze and dope are plentiful, the cops are lax, and the homeless culture is so widespread you can disappear into it.” With compassion, an eye for detail, and an instinct for the human stories behind the statistics, Fagan gives voice to the often-anonymous individuals propelled on downward spirals that take them from suburbia and middle-class comforts to mean streets rife with panhandling, AIDS, fentanyl, disease, and death. When needed, Fagan brings in facts: 35% of San Francisco’s unhoused are Black, yet they make up only 6% of the population. Born and raised in the Bay Area and briefly homeless himself, Fagan knows what it’s like to be without a bed at the end of the day. In his book, he focuses on a traffic island that’s dubbed “Homeless Island.” Perched between the Tenderloin and Mission districts, it’s not far from City Hall. Fagan contrasts Homeless Island with the beauty and wealth of a city that has long prided itself on its caring—but that often doesn’t want to acknowledge the waves of refugees from elsewhere who arrive without resources and must find a space on a sidewalk or under a bridge. “The Shame of the City,” a Chronicle series on homelessness that Fagan produced, helped inspire California Gov. Gavin Newsom to create “Homeward Bound,” a program that reunites the unhoused with family and friends. Like that series, this book is powerful, offering a humanizing and hopeful portrait of an abiding problem.
A rare look at citizens often denied their dignity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781668017111
Page Count: 288
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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