Homelessness : an annotated bibliography /

An exhaustive bibliography that meets the needs of researchers on homelessness who have long awaited a comprehensive literature resource. Volume 1 is a list of works arranged alphabetically by author, followed by those written anonymously. Each entry includes an annotation providing a succinct overview of the piece's findings, issues, research relevance, and theme. In lieu of a subject index, Volume 2 consists of 41 topical sub-bibliographies derived from the main volume, in which all items are unannotated; readers must refer back to Volume 1 for annotations. Sources cited include books, major newspapers, academic and nonacademic journals, government publications, and conference proceedings. Henslin provides a thorough review of the literature of homelessness from preindustrial America to the present, going far beyond Joan Nordquist's The Homeless in America: A Bibliography (1988). The dearth of current bibliographic guides on homelessness makes Henslin's book invaluable for all academic institutions supporting social science programs. M. A. Lutes; University of Notre Dame

This bibliography brings together a wide array of sources on a critical global social issue. The author's introduction notes a key purpose is to bring together the vast literature across disciplines as a source for research. The first volume consists of 3,300 annotated entries arranged by author. The clearly written, objective annotations range from a concise sentence to an explanatory paragraph. The range of sources is broad--articles on street children in Columbia, skid-row studies in England in the 1930s, a Swedish psychiatric journal, 1894 articles on Coxey's march of the unemployed in the U.S., 1907 articles by Jack London, a 1966 Canadian medical journal, and sixteenth-century books on vagrants in Europe. Predominantly, though, the references are to recent articles in the U.S. popular press and scholarly journals. The author acknowledges that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were heavily referenced, and, in a sample, 26 of 56 entries were from those two sources, beginning in the late 1980s. The second volume lists the same citations in 41 subject sections, ranging from Advocacy to Homeless Women, and includes such topics as AIDS, suburban and rural homelessness, voting, and mental illness. If warranted, entries are in more than one section. Full citations are repeated in the second volume, but the annotations are not. An accurate author index concludes this volume. The author has achieved his purpose in bringing together literature on the many dimensions of homelessness, and the work will be useful to many researchers. However, although the second volume serves as a partial subject index, it is limited. If a user is interested in homelessness among Native Americans or in Washington, D.C., extensive browsing is needed. Finally, the work is more expensive than it needs to be. Volume 1 is really useless except that it contains the annotations. It would have made more sense to just publish one volume with the annotated citations arranged in the 41 categories, followed by an author index. This work should be considered by large public and academic libraries. (Reviewed Sept. 1, 1993)