100 Books Like How the Other Half Lives

Walls’ recounts her unconventional childhood marked by poverty, instability, and the eccentric choices of her parents.

The memoir offers an unflinching but often tender portrait of a deeply flawed family and the complicated bonds of love and loyalty. Walls’s voice is both clear-eyed and compassionate as she revisits her past.

Wanting to make sense of my own dysfunctional family, I reread this book several times.

If you ask me or anyone else in the punk scene in 80s/90s New York, St. Mark’s Place—which was the epicenter of cool in our day—is a sad parody of itself now, touristy and dull. Until I read this book, I assumed its heyday began and ended with us, with Trash and Vaudeville and Manic Panic, with drinking 40-ounce beers on stoops.

Well, it turns out every generation that’s ever had a heyday on this famous, radical, anarchic block—whether as a gangster or dancing at Andy Warhol’s notorious Electric Circus parties—thought theirs was the only era that mattered. Calhoun chronicles hundreds of years of this exact attitude, which is fascinating and gives me some perspective.

Growing up in New York City, I’ll never forget my first experience, at around the age of seven, with people literally living underground. Our subway stalled in a tunnel in front of an abandoned station. The lights went off in the car and the platform outside was cast in an eerie orange glow by a single bulb.

Suddenly, a figure emerged from the shadows, charged my subway car, and started banging wildly and laughing maniacally, just on the other side of the glass to me. This continued for what felt like a million years before the train came back to life, and we moved on.

Decades later, I discovered this book about a parallel city below mine where people like that man live an alternative existence in miles and miles of dark warrens underground. I’m obsessed with it.

The only thing that makes me cringe about this book is that I was supposed to be in the film adaptation when I was young, but my (violent and idiotic) boyfriend at the time ruined that opportunity for me. It’s essentially a series of entertaining, hilarious, edgy stand-alone stories that interweave into chapters, turning what could have been short stories into a novel.

It perfectly freezes in amber a moment in time (the 80s NY downtown art scene), the type of incredible characters who lived in it, motivated by conflated goals of self-expression and fame, and how it shaped/distorted/sometimes destroyed them.

Having been a part of the art and music scenes in NY a bit later, reckoning with my own aspirations and ego and navigating a cavalcade of incredible, sometimes menacing, often ego-centric characters in my own life, it rings true.

I’ll bookend this list with what I consider to be a sort of updated take on Larry Clark’s Tulsa. Serbian photog Boogie has published similarly solemn collections on Moscow and war-torn Belgrade. With It’s All Good, he arrived in New York’s most violent neighborhoods circa 2010 to document the hard and often tragic lives of urban youth. Gangsters pointing their guns into the lens or jabbing their veins with needles might not make the most appealing coffee table book, but the photos themselves are even more sublime than anything shot by Clark, making this book a worthy successor.

Can’t Get There from Here is another stark look at the realities of kids living on the street. Strasser quickly drew me into the life of Maybe and her tribe of friends Maggot, 2Moro, Rainbow, and Tears. Their day-to-day existence is one of scrounging for food, looking for a safe place to sleep for the night, and avoiding those who would harm them. Adults have hurt these kids so many times and in so many ways that their reluctance to trust the police for help is totally understandable.

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 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.

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. 

In my comic strips, all my people, streets, and buildings look real because I walked those New York streets and sketched from life. Eisner’s fictional stories are also jam-packed with reality. But his people, Bronx streets, and buildings were already stored in his memory banks, ready to be released onto the page through his bold and expressive ink lines. Hang on, because Eisner will take you by the sleeve—or, more often, the throat—saying, “Look at this world, at these people, listen to them, this is life!” and you sense that it’s also his life he’s talking, and drawing, about.