85 Books Like Breaking Night

This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home tells the story of the difficulty of finding acceptable housing for the poor in New York City. Sandler follows the story of a young, poor, unwed mother, Camila, for one year as she struggles to find safe and affordable housing for herself and her newborn son. Against all odds, red tape, and never-ending bureaucracy, Camila never gives up. I found this story inspiring as well as educational about the homelessness crisis in New York City, a new found passion after my experience trying to feed the homeless during the first year of the pandemic.

I met Matthew Desmond before he became one of the youngest Professors with his own center at Princeton University. He was visiting London, had just published his first book, and was still finishing the research for this book.

Desmond did an enormous amount of field research; he spent months living in a trailer park, on top of thousands of hours in archives and courtrooms where eviction cases are decided. The result is the best book I have ever read about poverty.

What happens when ‘normal people’ get evicted? Desmond’s story is rich and personal, and that is what we need: we need to understand the lives of poor people better in order to finally decide that we must change the systems that put them there. 

Andrea Elliott, a New York Times reporter, spent nearly a decade reporting on Dasani Coates, a Black child growing up in a New York City shelter, and the result is a deeply humane look at a family in poverty.

This Pulitzer-winning book makes clear that the child protection system is a downstream solution to problems that begin with the failure of our society to meet families’ basic human needs.

As Dasani’s journey becomes public in a front page New York Times series, she is afforded an opportunity to escape poverty and become educated in an elite institution, but Elliott shows that plucking a favored child out of her family—even for the most positive of reasons—is still painful for the child.

Ron Hall’s #1 New York Times bestselling book, Same Kind of Different as Me, was the first book I read about homelessness, and I credit it with opening my eyes to this crisis. His uplifting story about his wife’s and his efforts to help the homeless in their neighborhood was also made into a film. Ron’s story focuses on one of the many homeless people he helped, a man named Denver Moore, who went on to live with Ron after Ron’s wife died. Denver also co-authored several of Ron’s books. My book is also co-authored with one of the homeless people I met, a woman named Maggie Wright. Our books are the only ones I know of that include the direct voice of a homeless person, and I feel this adds a necessary depth to a story about homelessness.

Catherine Ryan Hyde does a masterful job of showing us the stark reality of teen homelessness through the eyes of Jordy and Chloe. The content of the first few chapters was hard for me to read because of what young people must do to survive on the street and what traumas lead them there in the first place. As the story unfolded, though, Hyde took me on a warm and loving journey as Jordy set out to show Chloe that there truly is a lot of beauty in the world. 

This book is the first to finally put to rest the blame-the-victim causal explanations for homelessness. Using economic and geographic data, Colburn and Aldern show that homelessness is the result of poverty, but not only poverty; for example, Detroit has low rates of homelessness.

Essential is the existence of economic inequities combined with the unavailability of affordable housing, for example, in New York City. This book makes my teaching about homelessness so much easier.

I liked this book immediately, and not just because it is written by someone I know and have worked with for decades and greatly respect. The book includes parts of the author’s early iconic work on homelessness in New York City, which, when published as a report in 1981, first focused public attention on the then-growing crisis.

The book includes stories of homeless New Yorkers that the author encountered when he lived for a period on the streets, in shelters, and flophouses as part of his research—an approach I found fascinating—as well as scholarly analysis. It’s a rich resource I return to again and again for insight, understanding, and, as needed, inspiration.

Sixteen-year-old Dylan has lost everything. His mother has thrown him out of their house and he’s forced to live on the streets, begging for handouts and avoiding the thugs that threaten him daily. During my work as a literacy mentor, one of the teachers I supported taught a particularly challenging group with a ringleader (I’ll call him Sean) who frequently interrupted lessons with unruly outbursts. I suggested that the teacher try ending his lessons ten minutes early and reading a few pages of Theories of Relativity as a reward when the group performed well. A week later when I came to observe the teacher’s practice, Sean stopped me before class and demanded, “Have you read Theories of Relativity?” I pretended I hadn’t and he breathlessly summarized the story they’d heard so far. And during the lesson, he shushed anyone whose behaviour might have interfered with that day’s reading, which… show more.

“Middle-class academic writes nonfiction about homeless substance abuser” – that sounds like a recipe for overweening earnestness at best, or at worst an exploitative catastrophe. But right from the first line of this astonishing book you know that the author isn’t entirely in control, that the subject, his troubled friend Stuart Shorter, has agency in these pages in a way he seldom did elsewhere in life. It’s a gut-crunchingly sad story, but also often very funny – which, you get the feeling, is exactly how Stuart would have wanted it.

This book is by an accomplished advocate I know and have worked with, and tells the story of her own experience with homelessness. It’s a detailed and intimate account of her struggle, and it drew me in with the author’s honesty, specificity, and refusal to give up her sense of self.

I read it as I was working on my own book and struggling with whether and how to use my voice in the narrative. Her book is very different from mine, but it inspired me and helped me see how I could use my own experience while also keeping the stories of unhoused people in the fore.