In his first book, award-winning investigative journalist Brian Barth takes us on an immersive journey deep into Silicon Valley’s homeless encampments, challenging everything we thought we knew about our unhoused neighbors.
A Cappella Books and Georgia Center for the Book welcome author Brian Barth to discuss his new book, Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia. Barth will appear in conversation with AJC cultural reporter Christopher Daniel.
This event is free and open to the public. Copies of Front Street will be available for purchase.
About the Book
In this wide-reaching portrait of the constellation of people living in tents, shacks, and cars in the shadow of tech campuses and skyscrapers, award-winning journalist Brian Barth introduces us to the misfits, activists, and iconoclasts of Silicon Valley’s homeless encampments. Blending memoir, investigative reporting, history, and cultural criticism to paint a portrait of a community searching for dignity and connection in the midst of a national crisis, Front Street is a conversation-changing story about the struggle for housing.
This immersive work follows residents of three distinct camps—Crash Zone in San Jose, Wood Street in Oakland, and Wolfe Camp in Cupertino. Regularly harassed by police and local government, and frequently at risk of often violent and always destabilizing sweeps, these camps may seem chaotic to some but more often than not, to their residents they are sites of refuge and rebirth. In research on 19th- and 20th-century homelessness and philosophical contemplations of communal anarchy, and through honest conversations with residents, Barth shows how the solution to homelessness isn’t as straightforward as one might think.
Front Street considers the root causes and possible solutions to chronic homelessness, contemplating political, economic, social and spiritual approaches alike. With empathy and poise, Barth follows this cast of characters, describing their personal stories, quotidian experiences, private philosophies and political activism. In doing so, Front Street explains why the country’s current approach to homelessness has become at once cruel and ineffective and makes the radical argument that encampments, when treated generously and fairly, have something important to teach the rest of us about autonomy, dignity, connection and care.
About the Author
Brian Barth is an award-winning independent journalist with bylines in the New Yorker, National Geographic, Washington Post, The New Republic and Mother Jones, among other publications. He lives between the Bay Area and California's remote Lost Coast region, where he is developing a spiritual refuge—open to seekers, broken souls, and all of humankind—amid a foggy, fern-filled forest. Front Street is his first book.
About the Conversation Partner
Christopher A. Daniel is a Black Culture reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is an Atlanta-based, award-winning journalist, cultural critic and ethnomusicologist. The Spartanburg, South Carolina, native previously held teaching stints with Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University and Georgia State University: creating each universities' music, entertainment, and lifestyle journalism courses.
Decatur Library
215 Sycamore Street, Decatur, Georgia 30030
Mon Dec 8
All Ages
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