PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe book, a chronicle of Dr. Jim’s work and the city’s unsheltered population as seen through his eyes, is at its most moving when Kidder’s camera zooms in tight on the semi-dysfunctional relationship between Dr. Jim and Tony, who look to each other for solace from the horrors they’ve witnessed and experienced on the streets. As Rough Sleepers progresses, their relationship becomes its primary focus, culminating in a brutal revelation that may provide the key to unlocking the mystery of why, exactly, Tony has been on the streets so long ... Nearly all Kidder’s encounters with the homeless are mediated by Dr. Jim, whom he shadowed on and off for five years. It’s a problem endemic to much reporting on the unhoused: Journalists tend to see them through the eyes of doctors or advocates, who are more familiar and comfortable sources. In Kidder’s case, the result is that he never establishes the rapport with Tony that might enable him to probe deeply into key aspects of his experience. But writing about the homeless ethically demands treating them with as much scrutiny as any subject of nonfiction; respecting them means asking the hard questions. Kidder instead relies on his prodigious skills as a reporter to round out his portrait, digging into public records and social science research, and drawing on his months of observation. But even as he movingly captures Tony’s ultimate collapse, the reader never fully understands its etiology.
Jeff Hobbs
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewHobbs’s carefully observed journalistic account, written with the detached intimacy of ethnography and reported over a year and hundreds of hours spent watching and interviewing his subjects in class, at dances, sporting events, assemblies, homecomings, proms, graduations and in the students’ homes, helps flesh out this larger body of work with an empathetic but objective eye, and in so doing widens our view of the modern \'immigrant experience\' to include that classic crucible: high school and college admissions, specifically, the experience of first-generation overachievers and the unique challenges they face in this regard ... Hobbs contrasts the experiences of the two groups of boys and is interested in how both groups struggle to carve out lives from the expectations prompted by their origins...But his attempt to link their senior-year struggles through the supposed \'stigma\' that results from their origins feels facile, and ignores meatier discussions of race or class that would better illuminate the boys’ two worlds — and the gulfs between them. The inclusion of the Beverly Hills students makes the narrative feel unbalanced, especially given the wildly lower stakes of their challenges compared with those of their peers in Compton, and by the end of the book, one doesn’t have a much greater understanding of the factors that structure the lives of both groups of boys, nor, really, why some have succeeded while others failed ... Readers of Hobbs’s last book will know that the value of getting into an Ivy League school, absent relief from broader systemic racism and economic disadvantage, is often dubious. Oddly, Hobbs’s subjects seem to understand this better than Hobbs himself ... readers aren’t likely to be convinced by Hobbs’s broader suggestion that the American dream, that \'fantastical cycle,\' has simply been picked up and revived by the newest generation of ambitious immigrant youth like Carlos, Tio, Luis and Byron. But despite the book’s perhaps unfounded optimism and baffling juxtaposition between Compton and Beverly Hills, Show Them You’re Good is an admirable addition to the growing body of literature that humanizes the struggles and expands the scope of our understanding of the lives of immigrant youth at a time when they’re under near-constant threat of dehumanization.
Madeline Ffitch
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review.. succeeds in mapping the obscure psychological and emotional territory that defines a life caught between commitment and ambivalence, between rebellion and resignation ... Ffitch hasn’t refuted the frontier novel so much as added a new chapter to an old saga. Just like the American pioneers the author might like to disown, her characters achieve independence, but fall far short of utopia. Their experiment remains incomplete, ongoing — the road ahead wide open but fraught with danger and uncertainty.
