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Reviews
VOICES FROM THE STREET: TRUTHS ABOUT HOMELESSNESS FROM SISTERS OF THE ROAD
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edited by Jessica Morrell
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| Gray Sunshine Publishing, Portland, Oregon, 2007. Illustrations, photographs, index. 384 pages. $24.95 paper. |
| Over the course of the past several years, homeless men and women came to a small office in central Portland to meet with volunteer interviewers and talk about their lives in recorded sessions lasting two to three hours each. Other volunteers transcribed and coded the interviews. The project operated under the aegis of Sisters of the Road, a long-established and highly regarded nonprofit organization located in the Old Town neighborhood that serves affordable meals and provides a place of refuge and community for people who are homeless or down and out. Usable interviews numbering 515 yielded roughly fifteen thousand pages of text, and Sisters of the Road hired writer Jessica P. Morrell to digest the material into the present book. |
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It is unlikely that anyone can read Voices from the Street without being moved. The book offers glimpses into the "truths" (or, more specifically, lived experiences) of homeless men and women in Portland in the first years of the twenty-first century. The book is organized by topic: why people ended up without homes; interactions with law enforcement and everyday violence on the streets; physical health, mental health, and chemical dependency; the challenges of finding work; spirituality and personal aspirations; and practical needs and dreams for the future. In each chapter, readers meet twenty or twenty-five different individuals, typically through a half-page or so of their own words plus some bridging commentary summarized from their interviews. The excerpts are always on target and sometimes eloquent, evidence of the care with which Morrell made the selections. The effect is a bit like a conversation around a crowded table, with many voices offering different insights and variations on the theme of the chapter. |
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There is power here. This is a work marked by pathos in its formal sense of a quality that arouses feelings of sympathy and sorrow. To read the testimony of hundreds of individuals is to hold a mirror to our own perceptions. It is also a work that tries to increase understanding of the challenges of everyday life as faced by Americans who it is easy to ignore or stereotype. It helps to be reminded what it is like to be chronically ill and homeless, what it is like to look for a job without a home address, and what it is like to live vulnerable to random violence. As one of the interviewers comments, "I learned there is so much wisdom and a staggering amount of pain walking around our streets" (p. 285). |
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Voices from the Street is not a book of history or social science. Apart from a handful of paragraphs in chapter introductions, it neither explores the complex and changing history of homelessness in Portland or the United States nor provides insight into the development of those sections of Portland where many of the homeless live and struggle. Because the interviews are presented in short excerpts, it is also impossible to follow life stories with any detail or depth. Finally, readers have little way to know how representative the experiences and testimonies may be (the introduction mentions that a consultant designed the methodology, but there is no amplification of that single sentence). The information base is drawn from the self-selected individuals who were willing to be interviewed, and the themes and illustrative excerpts are those that struck a single writer as most important, most telling, or most poignant. |
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None of these comments, I think, will bother the project sponsors, for they sought — and created — a book that will be a strong tool in the fight for improving the lives and life chances of the very poor. This is, ultimately, a book with two goals. It empowers women and men on the margins of society by giving their voices standing within the formal covers of a book. And it seeks to change public attitudes and policies by adding those men's and women's insights — their reality check — into the contentious debates over social programs. |
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| Carl Abbott
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| Portland State University |
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