The art of building a successful sleeper has varied over the decades as styles and times have changed. One fact that remains constant is that the car's appearance belies its performance potential. In Street Sleepers, the secrets are exposed and the owners and builders of some of America's quickest street machines share their deceptive art. Outstanding photography and in-depth owner interviews tell the tale, and even engine specifications and quarter-mile track times are shared. There was a time when such things were well-guarded secrets, but this book truly exposes all the tricks!
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The powerful story of an inspiring doctor who made a difference, by helping to create a program to care for Boston’s homeless community—by the Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling author of Mountains Beyond Mountains “I couldn’t put Rough Sleepers down. I am left in awe of the human spirit and inspired to do better.”—Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, BookPage, Chicago Public Library Tracy Kidder has been described by The Baltimore Sun as “a master of the nonfiction narrative.” In Rough Sleepers, Kidder tells the story of Dr. Jim O’Connell, a gifted man who invented a community of care for a city’s unhoused population, including those who sleep on the streets—the “rough sleepers.” After Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General, the hospital’s chief of medicine made a proposal: Would he defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens? That year turned into O’Connell’s life’s calling. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they work with thousands of homeless patients, some of whom we meet in this illuminating book. We travel with O’Connell as he navigates the city streets at night, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, humor, and friendship to some of the city’s most endangered citizens. He emphasizes a style of medicine in which patients come first, joined with their providers in what he calls “a system of friends.” Much as he did with Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains, Kidder explores how Jim O’Connell and a dedicated group of people have improved countless lives by facing and addressing one of American society’s most difficult problems, instead of looking away.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are without a home, sleeping on streets or in temporary shelters. Nearly one-fifth of homeless Americans suffer from an untreated mental illness. Due in part to reductions in state and city budgets, many who need assistance are left to live on the street. One natural byproduct of a life on the street is criminal behavior, as adaptation to illegal acts becomes a matter of survival. Could ending homelessness reduce crime? What are ways in which that could be achieved, and whose responsibility is it? Are the homeless being unfairly blamed for street crime? This volume offers a close examination of the issue from a variety of viewpoints.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The extraordinary true story of four men who take the law into their own hands. This is the story of four young boys. Four lifelong friends. Intelligent, fun-loving, wise beyond their years, they are inseparable. Their potential is unlimited, but they are content to live within the closed world of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. And to play as many pranks as they can on the denizens of the street. They never get caught. And they know they never will. Until one disastrous summer afternoon. On that day, what begins as a harmless scheme goes horrible wrong. And the four find themselves facing a year’s imprisonment in the Wilkinson Home for Boys. The oldest of them is fifteen, the youngest twelve. What happens to them over the course of that year—brutal beatings, unimaginable humiliation—will change their lives forever. Years later, one has become a lawyer. One a reporter. And two have grown up to be murderers, professional hit men. For all of them, the pain and fear of Wilkinson still rages within. Only one thing can erase it. Revenge. To exact it, they will twist the legal system. Commandeer the courtroom for their agenda. Use the wiles they observed on the streets, the violence they learned at Wilkinson. If they get caught this time, they only have one thing left to lose: their lives. Praise for Sleepers “Undeniably powerful, an enormously affecting and intensely human story . . . Sleepers is a thriller, to be sure, but it is equally a wistful hymn to another age.”—The Washington Post Book World “A powerful book, hard to forget . . . Carcaterra is an excellent writer, changing pace here and there but never letting the reader go. . . . Sensitive, humorous, and harrowing, featuring dialogue with perfect pitch.”—The Denver Post “A gut-wrenching piece of work . . . [Lorenzo] Carcaterra’s graphic narrative grips like gunfire in a dark alley.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “A terrifying account of brutality and retribution, searing in its emotional truth, peopled with murderers, sadists, and thugs, but biblical in its passion and scope.”—People
Dr. O'Connell's collection of stories and essays, written during thirty years of caring for homeless persons in Boston, gently illuminates the humanity and raw courage of those who struggle to survive and find meaning and hope while living on the streets.
In 1945 the Labour Government set out to enable everyone to have a decent home, where people from all walks of life could live together. This dream was destroyed by a succession of avoidable mistakes and almost everyone now seems to believe that it is impossible to rediscover that vision. This book challenges that fatalism, tracing the policy mistakes that have given rise to this inequitable state from the folly of mass housing to the unfair tax privileges of many home owners. Holmes describes and advocates a new vision for the new millennium, finding solutions variously in development, planning, economic structures, social reform, and political reassessment to narrow the gap between rich and poor and enable people in all housing tenures to finally have a choice.
Despite an extensive literature on homelessness there is surprisingly little work that investigates the roots of homelessness by tracking homeless people over time. In this fascinating and much-needed ethnographic study, Megan Ravenhill presents the results of ten years' research on the streets and in the hostels and day-centres of the UK, incorporating intensive interviews with 150 homeless and formerly homeless people as well as policy makers and professionals working with homeless people. Ravenhill discusses the biographical, structural and behavioural factors that lead to homelessness. Amongst the important and unique features of the study are: the use of life-route maps showing the circumstances and decisions that lead to homelessness, a systematic study of the timescales involved, and a survey of people's exit routes from homelessness. Ravenhill also identifies factors that predict those most vulnerable to homelessness and factors that prevent or considerably delay the onset of homelessness.
This edited collection disrupts dominant narratives about space, states, and borders, bringing comparative ethnographic and geographic scholarship in conversation with one another to illuminate the varied ways in which space becomes socialized via political, economic, and cognitive appropriation. Societies must, first and foremost, do more than wrangle over ownership and land rights — they must dwell in space. Yet, historically the interactions between the state’s territorial imperative with previous forms of landscape management have unfolded in a variety of ways, including top-down imposition, resistance, and negotiation between local and external actors. These interactions have resulted in hybrid forms of territoriality, and are often fraught with fundamentally different perceptions of landscape. This book foregrounds these experiences and draws attention to situations in which different social constructions of space and territory coincide, collide, or overlap. Each ethnographic case in this volume presents forms of territoriality that are contingent upon contested histories, politics, landscape, the presence or absence of local heterogeneity and the involvement of multiple external actors with differing motivations — ultimately all resulting in the potential for conflict or collaboration and divergent implications for conceptions of community, autochthony and identity.
