RaveThe NationThere Is No Place for Us gives us five thorough and devastating accounts of what the housing system does ... The stories in There Is No Place for Us are not just a litany of unconnected Bad Events, though the specific twists and turns are very bad. The book is a powerful narrative of exactly why it is so hard even for people working as hard as they can to get secure housing ... The deftness with which Goldstone weaves together these personal tragedies with the details of the systemic cruelties that explain them is remarkable ... How do you tell stories about the impact of purposefully byzantine policies and laws on people’s lives when the details are usually so complicated that most people would lose the thread? Goldstone has managed to do that here for one of the most complicated issues in the country, with wide-ranging causes and consequences that touch on many aspects of modern American life. It is an incredible feat ... In the end, the effect of There Is No Place for Us is stunning and bleak ... As readers conclude There Is No Place for Us, they will feel both the deeply personal impacts of the tragedies explored in the book...and the horrible breadth of it all ... A book like this ought to be a rallying cry, the 21st-century equivalent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle ... Reading this book might not cause any policy to change. But it should change how Americans see each other and themselves, or at least our assumptions about what hard work gets you.
Meghan O'Rourke
RaveThe NationO’Rourke is not content with simply explaining what it’s like to be ill, though she does that very well. Instead, she deftly weaves scientific explanations of autoimmune illnesses and the broader problems of American medicine into a personal narrative of her search for answers ... O’Rourke refuses to give the reader trite reassurances that the \"wisdom\" gained from her experience with chronic illness was somehow worth it ... Perhaps its most valuable contribution is the way it articulates the loneliness and frustration of having symptoms that superficially resemble the pains and pressures of contemporary life in the United States while being much more severe.
