Review by Booklist Review
After his father's heart attack and his own, a shock at age 44, immersion journalist Sharlet, whose books The Family (2008) and C Street (2020) inspired a 2019 Netflix documentary series, began taking smartphone photographs. A night owl drawn to the off-kilter and the broken, his nocturnal wanderings brought him into contact with fellow night shifters. He took pictures of bakers and fast-food cashiers, drinkers and drug users, the overlooked, and the discounted, and got them to talk about themselves. Sharlet photographed tattoos and t-shirts, messages from the edge where people struggle with poverty, mental illness, and discrimination. Sharlet's most in-depth accounts tell the crushing stories of homeless people on Skid Row in L.A., especially the tragic tale of Charly Keunang, an elegant immigrant from Cameroon who was murdered in an unprovoked confrontation with police. Sharlet also recorded street encounters in Dublin, and the struggles of courageous gay activists in violently homophobic Moscow. With shimmers of Robert Frank and James Agee, Sharlet's images and words, hypnotic and haunting flares in the dark, coalesce into a trenchant work of witness and empathy.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2020 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lives lived in shadows and corners are lit up in these offbeat photo-journalistic essays. Journalist and Dartmouth writing professor Sharlet (The Family) roams several continents, snapping smartphone photos he posts on Instagram and talking to people: night-shift workers at a Dunkin Donuts in Vermont; a far-right gun fanatic in Schenectady, N.Y.; a Ugandan clergyman who's terrified of a witch's curse; brother-sister street-junkies in Dublin, Ireland. Most of the pieces are short, evanescent essays, but Sharlet includes longer pieces, including a profile of a homeless African immigrant on L.A.'s Skid Row who was shot to death, unarmed, by police, and a sketch of a mentally fragile New England woman struggling to control her life, her only friend a potted plant named Bandit. Sharlet's haunting photos accompany clipped, pointilist, but expressive prose that evokes character and tragedy: a New Hampshire arsonist "told the police (there were things he wanted them to know) that he used the flag to burn the church, that he tried to burn the children, that he did what he did--and, if they let him go, would do more--because he was angry with God." The result is a triumph of visual and written storytelling, both evocative and moving. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Following his father's heart attack, Sharlet (English, Dartmouth Coll.; The Family) spent many a night in isolation as he traveled between his home and his father's, often in the loneliest hours of the night. In these travels he met others living isolated lives, including graveyard shift workers and people experiencing illness or homelessness or violence, and started documenting their lives by posting their photographs on his Instagram account. Through these stories, Sharlet not only looks at their pain, but explores his own, and confronts these stories not by glamorizing the suffering, but humanizing it by breaking through the isolation and getting to know the subjects of his images, erasing the line between journalist and subject. VERDICT Sharlet provides a poignant and wholly intimate portrait of the lives of those who are often overlooked in our society, breathing a sense of humanity into a part of our world that is so often inhumane. A highly recommended book that is at times difficult to take in and difficult to put down.--Michael C. Miller, Austin P.L. & Austin History Ctr., TX
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Isolated lives shine from dark landscapes.After his father suffered a heart attack in 2014, journalist Sharlet (English and Creative Writing/Dartmouth Coll.; Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, and Other Essays on American Belief, 2014, etc.) traveled from his home on the Vermont/New Hampshire border to his father's home in Schenectady, usually at night. "It seemed easier," he writes, "the steep twisting road more likely to belong to me alone; the radio, when I could find a station, less clogged with news and yet more alive with voices. Night shift voices" that revealed "other people's nightmares and dreams, projected onto the black night-glass of the car windows." When he stopped for gas, food, or just to rest, he took snapshots, which he posted on Instagram along with moving narratives about the people he met during those interludes. Travels to Los Angeles, Nairobi, Russia, and Ireland yielded additional portraits of vulnerable "night shift voices," individuals "around whom the veil of the world is very thin." One of the longer pieces focuses on 61-year-old Mary Mazur, a disabled woman whose closest companion is a potted plant, which she carries with her when she forays out of her motel room, near midnight, to buy a Thanksgiving turkey. A mother at 19, her three children were taken from her around 1982, when she herself entered the social services system. Now, lonely and wheelchair-bound, she exclaims, "I'm not like everybody else!" Neither is Jared Miller, a "sweet soul" who started abusing drugs in the military and died of an overdose six months after Sharlet met him; or Charley Keunang, a homeless man in his 40s, killed by a police officer who claimed he reached for a guna claim contradicted by body-cam footage. Charley immigrated to the U.S. from Cameroon hoping to be an actor, got involved in a robbery, served 14 years in federal prison, and ended up on skid row. Gentle, dignified, and respectful, Charley was "one black life that mattered, no more or less than any other."An intimate, poignant look at life at the margins of society. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
