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Witnessing homelessness
JOHN KENDALL HAWKINS recommends a compassionate survey of the global scourge of homelessness, and those who help them
rough sleepers
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Rough Sleepers
Tracy Kidder, Random House, £17.27
PULITZER Prize-winning writer Tracy Kidder has a new book out, Rough Sleepers, that is timely, poignant, and depressingly true as an indictment of the fracturing values of our time.
Kidder, who won his Pulitzer for describing the symbiotic relationship between humans and computers in The Soul of a New Machine (1981), here chronicles the soul-sucking conditions of everyday people living on the streets.
As Kidder points out, “rough sleeping” is a 19th century British term to describe homelessness. That an old term is still fresh as a descriptor is the first depressing note about the book to swallow. One thinks of George Orwell’s slightly later memoir, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), which paints a picture of the tramp’s life.
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