This is not normal

Invisible Nation: Homeless Families in America by Richard Schweid (University of California Press, $29.95).

They’re not the homeless people we’re used to seeing on the streets. In fact, homeless families tend to fly under the radar deliberately, as Richard Schweid writes in Invisible Nation: Homeless Families in America, because of a determination to protect their children and provide at least the illusion of normalcy.

In Nashville, Portland, Boston and Dearborn, Schweid finds families living in motels and cars and talks to them about their lives, upending our judgments about how they got to this place and pointing out the Puritan values that keep us from helping the destitute. It is, he argues, ultimately a moral problem. Do we really want American children to grow up without a home?