Reckoning with Homelessness

Kim Hopper is Research Scientist at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and Lecturer at the Columbia University Schools of Public Health and Law. He is a cofounder of both the New York and the National Coalitions for the Homeless. He is the coauthor of Sociology In Medicine, Third Edition, and coeditor of the upcoming Recovery from Schizophrenia: An International Perspective.

• Part I: Classification and History1. This Business of Taking Stock2. Unearned Keep: From Almshouse to Shelter in New York CityPart II: Fieldwork and FrameworkIntroduction: Ethnography in the Annals of Homelessness3. Streets, Shelters, and Flops: An Ethnographic Study of Homeless Men, 1979–19824. The Airport as Home5. Out for the Count: The Census Bureau's 1990 S-Night Enumeration6: Homelessness and African American MenPart III: Advocacy and Engagement7. Negotiating Settlement: Advocacy for the Homeless Poor in the United States, 1980–19958. Limits to Witnessing: From Ethnography to EngagementNotesReferencesIndex

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.(Social Service Review) 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) Hopper continues to push the envelope in the study of homelessness and, by extension, in the field of anthropology and on all fronts of the endeavor: theory, method, and politics. His work contains instances of brilliance as he offers his rich insight on the whole enterprise of poverty, homelessness, and contemporary citizenship.... Hopper challenges himself, his discipline, our collective social world, and each one of us to go beyond our moral witnessing to engaged advocacy and political action. Summing Up: Highly Recommended.(Choice)