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Reviews
Ensign's Skid Road exposes the entrenched roots of our contemporary crisis. She reveals how physical, visible sites of destitution — and the misery they contain — have long been features of Seattle's landscape: shantytowns, the sprawling Hooverville, tent encampments, tiny villages, shelters, doorways, abandoned homes, vehicles, rundown RVs. She then humanizes this topography by adding flesh and bone and heart to some of the homeless people who have experienced it.
Ensign's novel unearths the layers of Seattle history underlying our current housing crisis. Centering long-silenced perspectives of those in the margins of society, the provocative read is informed by Ensign's own lived experience of homelessness and over three decades of her work providing primary health care to unhoused populations.
Timely, unique, and important. I have never read a book quite like this one. A gifted writer, Ensign uses narrative history to reveal various intersectionalities and tensions in the machine of structural and systemic inequities, oppression, violence, and trauma. Her storytelling touches on racism, sexism, xenophobia, colonialism, and religion as historical contributors to the live, undulating city of Seattle we have today. History buffs, especially Seattle ones, will find it irresistible.
Josephine Ensign has written an important and provocative book. Her Skid Road explores the intersection of history, health, poverty, private charity, and public policy in Seattle with compassion and common sense. Ensign's work is essential reading for every citizen, medical practitioner, policy-maker, and social equity advocate, untangling the 'wicked problem' of homelessness with anger and hope.
An informative and intriguing examination of the history of homelessness in Seattle. Skid Road provides critical context on the myriad issues—racism, sexism, substance abuse, mental illness, and more—that perpetuate cycles of poverty and homelessness in the region. A must-read for policy-makers, advocates, service providers, and anyone seeking to understand the roots of homelessness.
Josephine Ensign's Skid Road is a welcome addition to Seattle histories. I guarantee no matter how much you think you know about the city, you'll discover something new in this fascinating story of those who lack shelter and mental health care—a problem Seattleites have wrestled with from the city's very beginnings.
Skid Road's powerful narrative vividly underlines the deep historical co-dependence of shelter, destitution, and ill-health in Seattle. With an empathy and insight borne of personal experience, Ensign expertly reveals the hidden traumas of people experiencing homelessness and connects them to urban America's long-standing structural inequalities. Ensign's urgent history of the now is an important call to action.
Josephine Ensign's thoughtful, deeply researched history of the unhoused, poor, and mentally ill in the Northwest's largest city is a compassionate, incisive, and timely intervention in a conversation that has been going on for well over a century, but which feels especially important now. A must-read.
There are so many reasons to read this book. If you believe in the power of the health humanities, this is for you; if you want outstanding, sensitive contemporary ethnography, this is for you; if you want an immaculately researched account of the intersection of health and homelessness which is at the same time an engaging place story, this is for you.
Through meticulous research and vivid storytelling, Ensign takes us back to the sights, sounds, and smells of an 1850s Seattle waterfront and the man 'destined' to become the city's first homeless person. From there, she exposes the entangled roots of poverty and homelessness, the convenience and callousness with which we blame individuals to divert attention from a rigged system. Fascinating, sobering, powerful.
Skid Road promises to appeal to a number of audiences with tales of homelessness through history from a Western frontier state.
Ensign excavates the social, political, and individual structures and issues that have denied the fundamental need of shelter to too many for too long. Her clinical and personal experiences shine through the narratives and point to an undiminished belief in the power to address inequities like homelessness in 'radical and innovative ways,' improving life for all.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
312
ISBN
9781421440132
Illustration Description
10 plates
Table of Contents
Prologue. One Woman's Seattle
Chapter 1. Brother's Keeper
Chapter 2. Skid Road
Chapter 3. The Sisters
Chapter 4. Ark of Refuge
Chapter 5. Shacktown
Chapter 6. Threshold
Chapter 7. State of Emergency
Epilogue
Prologue. One Woman's Seattle
Chapter 1. Brother's Keeper
Chapter 2. Skid Road
Chapter 3. The Sisters
Chapter 4. Ark of Refuge
Chapter 5. Shacktown
Chapter 6. Threshold
Chapter 7. State of Emergency
Epilogue. Hearing Voices
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Featured Contributor
Josephine Ensign, RN, DrPH
Josephine Ensign (SEATTLE, WA) is a professor in the School of Nursing and an adjunct professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Catching Homelessness: A Nurse's Story of Falling Through the Safety Net and Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City.Resources
