Unsheltered Love

January 27, 2023

Medford-Rosow (Unblinded: One Man's Courageous Journey Through Darkness to Sight) relates the stories of several people in New York City who were homeless at the start of the COVID pandemic. In March 2020, the author and her husband noticed the increased number of unhoused people living on the streets of their New York City neighborhood. Concerned about their survival, Medford-Rosow brought them sandwiches regularly and gradually befriended several. She tells each person's story, focusing on how they came to be homeless and the efforts to find them social services and a room. The stories of the unhoused people are contrasted with events from the author's own life, demonstrating that the circumstances that cause people to lose their homes are not uncommon. At the end of each chapter, Maggie Wright, one of Medford-Rosow's unhoused friends, gives her perspective on the chapter's events, providing additional insight. The author ponders the impact that the first year of the pandemic and New York City's COVID policies had on the unhoused population. VERDICT A moving account of the experience of unhoused people in a major American city.--Rebekah Kati

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2023
A New Yorker connects with her unhoused neighbors in this memoir. Medford-Rosow's story of developing meaningful personal relationships with houseless people who spent their days near her Manhattan home is effectively a 2020 time capsule. It recounts the changes that Covid-19 brought to New York City and offers a humane account of the realities that people without housing face. The sudden shutdown of many local businesses in March 2020 meant that local panhandlers had few donors, so Medford-Rosow and her husband, Joel, began taking daily walks through their neighborhood, first offering people dollar bills and then homemade sandwiches. Over time, they developed close relationships with several people, got to know their stories, and supported them as they tried to move into sheltered housing. Medford-Rosow connected most deeply with a woman who served as this book's developmental editor and contributed short essays to the text under the pseudonym Maggie Wright; in them, she writes about the same events as the author but from her own perspective. In these pages, Medford-Rosow writes about emotional moments with an admirable lack of sentimentality. Throughout, she takes pains not to portray herself and Joel as heroic--for instance, she still worries that the city's plan to use nearby hotels as shelters will hurt local property values--and she offers no broad policy recommendations. Instead, Maggie's personal journey, with its many setbacks and successes, serves as the book's core, and it's an effective one; her middle-class background and struggles with addiction are likely to resonate with many readers. The book also does an effective job of evoking the uncertainty of the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, from the initial assumptions that offices would only be closed briefly to phases of reopening to premature claims of victory as the first wave receded. A focused and engaging remembrance of a specific community changed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.