Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People

Pulitzer winner Kidder (A Truck Full of Money) spotlights in this poignant account the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, “the country’s largest medical system wholly devoted to the care of homeless people.” At the center of the narrative is Jim O’Connell, the program’s founding physician and organizer of its Street Team, which ministers to people who shun shelters and live “mainly outside or in makeshift quarters.” According to Kidder, the Health Care for the Homeless Program works against the grain of corporate medicine by emphasizing continuity of care and the importance of listening attentively to and spending time with homeless people. Interwoven with O’Connell’s story are those of his patients, including Tony Columbo, who spent 18 years in prison for sexual assault and struggles with substance abuse and mental disorders. Drawing on five years’ worth of reporting, Kidder vividly portrays life on the streets and in the program’s health clinics, and sheds light on various legal and policy matters, though the focus is less on the institutional forces that contribute to chronic homelessness than on the individual lives it touches. Keenly observed and fluidly written, this is a compassionate report from the front lines of one of America’s most intractable social problems. (Jan.)