Here's some more social isolation reading for you. As you may know, I've spent a lot of my career working on housing and homelessness. I could write endlessly about policy and service responses (indeed, I have in other forums) but this is not the place for that. Instead, here are two books that tell great homelessness stories. *** A few years ago I read John Healy's The Grass Arena , his account of life as a homeless alcoholic in London. This remarkable book was first published in 1988, made into a movie in 1991, then disappeared off the radar for years after Healy had a dispute with his publishers. It was finally republished in 2008 by Penguin Modern Classics and it is this edition that I read. Healy was born in London in 1943, the son of poor working class Irish immigrants. As a child he suffered abuse at the hands of his father and this set the course of his life. He was an angry man. As a teenager he took up boxing, feeling exhilaration when he mana
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson