MARIA DUARTE recommends a remarkable study of the friendship between a Palestinian and a Pakistani, broken by a hostile state
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The casualties of prosperity
JOHN HAWKINS is moved by an oral history that examines five black families pushed into homelessness in the US
A homeless man in New York
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MATTHEW HAWKINS rakes through un-fancy words and flair-free summaries to find who and what might be flamboyant
PETER MASON is exhilarated by an exciting, well-considered and historically minded tribute to the great Trinidadian instrument
Reducing historical lives to ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles, we lose the nuance of those lives and a clearer understanding of past societies, suggests CLAIRE ISABELLA GILMOUR
CHRIS SEARLE relishes the genius of pianist Alexander Hawkins, his many ensembles, and his new album
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
Brian Goldstone, Crown Publishing Group, £23
BRIAN GOLDSTONE tells us how we are all familiar the stigmatised homeless — “stumble-bum” winos, drug addicts, veterans of foreign or domestic abuse, the deincarcerated, the deinstitutionalised, folks living in Dickensian poverty — but now there’s a new and growing data statistic: the working homeless.
In his new book, Goldstone focuses on five families in the Atlanta area whose plight he sees as a dangerous rift in the social security safety net and a tipping point for the misery to come as class erosion continues to weaken the fabric of society.
“Families are not ‘falling’ into homelessness,” writes Goldstone, “they are being pushed.”
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