Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless

by Robert Desjarlais

Book Overview

Desjarlais shows us not anonymous faces of the homeless but real people.

While it is estimated that 25 percent or more of America's homeless are mentally ill, their lives are largely unknown to us. What must life be like for those who, in addition to living on the street, hear voices, suffer paranoid delusions, or have trouble thinking clearly or talking to others.

Shelter Blues is an innovative portrait of people residing...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812216229
• ISBN13: 9780812216226
• Release Date: August 1997
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Shelter Blues Rave Review:

This is an intriguing book that is organized around the lives of homeless shelter residents in a particularly unique facility in Boston. The shelter is located in a post-modern architecture anomaly, a masterpiece which was never completed, allowing the author to contemplate the idea of beautiful ruins, the sublime, and compare these ideas to the lives of the homeless residents. The book is incredible in that is meshes a wide range of theoretical approaches to studying sociology and attempts to discuss notions of experience, fear, and survival which are really difficult to take on. The book is not so much a case study, more a study of life and its effects.