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"[Glasser and Bridgman] present key themes from the available literature in a way that affords policy makers and other practitioners access to what it is that anthropology has to offer in thinking about and responding to homelessness on a day-to-day, ground level. In this endeavor, [the book] is supremely successful."

“This slim, useful book ... is suitable for students ... The fairly tight North American focus allows for great accuracy and detail, and the Canadian material is especially interesting, because Canadian social policy is less well known than that of the United States, and seems far more progressive on homelessness.”

Unlike what we too often teach, in abstractions, in lecture halls throughout the country, Glasser and Bridgman want it understood clearly that homelessness is a risk each of us faces and which each of us must take responsibility for. This book, brief as it is, makes clear what our students have been telling us, increasingly I have found, as more and more of them take up their own engagement with the politics of our era—an anthropology which is not politically and morally engaged in addressing the conditions of risk of inequality, and of powerlessness, is an anthropology which contributes to and perpetuates those conditions. This requires..."a refusal to play with the false opportunities of capitalism, a refusal to accept it as the natural order of things, and instead, working[ing] towards a critique that, in its perceptions, helps formulate alternatives (Smith,Gavin. 'Confronting the Present,' University of Toronto Press, 1999, p. 267). While Glasser and Bridgman focus on one such set of conditions and alternatives, their argument speaks loudly and effectively to anthropologists and their students about the obligations each of us has to become active agents, not only for social understanding but, most importantly, for social change.

Metraux, Stephen. 2001. Review of Braving the Street: The Anthropology of Homelessness (by Irene Glasser and Rae Bridgman). Contemporary Sociology 29: 718-719.

[The authors emphasize] the need to place individual attributes typically asssociated with homeless persons, such as mental illness or drug abusein, into a broader structural context that inclues issues such as housing, employment, and urban decline. [They] showcase ethnographic research, showing how this research does more than just contribute 'local color' to presentations of homelessness.

Wolch, Jennifer. 2001. Review of Braving the Street: The Anthropology of Homelessness (by Irene Glasser and Rae Bridgman). International Journal of Urban & Regional Research 25(2).

Braving the Street...is a welcome and accessible addition to the literature on contemporary homelessness. It demonstrates how useful anthropological perspectives and methods can be in the area of urban homelessness, and articulates some of the most intriguing and vital questions that remain open and need attention from researchers.

See also: Braving Homelessness on the Ethnographic Street with Irene Glasser and Rae Bridgman, by Mary Madden. Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 3, 289-304 (2003) and R. Bridgman and I. Glasser; and Bridgman and Glasser's response—Book Review: Response to Mary Madden's review article, 'Braving Homelessness on the Ethnographic Street with Irene Glasser and Rae Bridgman.' Critique of Anthropology, June 1, 2005; 25(2): 207 - 208. (Available through Sage Journals Online.)

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