Kim 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.
"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."
Library Journal
"For more than twenty years, Kim 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
"Reckoning with Homelessness... 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."
