ROUGH SLEEPERS: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People, by Tracy Kidder. Random House, New York. 2023. Hardback, 298 pages. $30.00.
Tracy Kidder has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. He has written many other books including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mountains Beyond Mountains.”
“Rough Sleepers “chronicles the work of Dr. Jim O’Connell, who has dedicated his career to caring for homeless patients.
“Rough Sleepers” follows Dr. Jim O’Connell, onetime philosophy graduate student turned Harvard-trained physician who, since 1985, has been treating Boston’s most vulnerable unhoused population: the city’s “rough sleepers”, men and women who dwell mostly out of doors, on the margins — in parks, in subway tunnels, on sidewalks. Bedding down outside, they die at 10 times the rate as housed Bostonians. They die of overdoses, of being set on fire, of being beaten to death, of suicide, of falling asleep in the snow and never waking up.
The 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 on the semi-dysfunctional relationship between Dr. Jim and Tony, who look at 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.
Tony, it’s clear, yearns for a way out of a life of desperation and violence, but he has no clue how to find the exit.
Sometimes we, who are housed and comfortable want to pretend the homeless and those on the street are invisible. This book helps us see their lives and suffering. Working in Christian childcare we are primarily involved with children, who have great needs, but this book is a good reminder of the injustice that goes on all around us.