In the Open: Diary of a Homeless Alcoholic Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

In the Open: Diary of a Homeless Alcoholic Book

Imagine Charles Bukowski with a degree in business administration, rambling across the United States and holding forth on business and the drinking life. Timothy Donohue is literate and intelligent, he's fond of quoting Emerson, and his head is bursting with novel ideas about how to make the economy work better. He's also blind drunk much of the time. When lucid he recounts his misadventures in his journal. This book is startling, a brutal first-person narrative of life on the drunken underside of America. It's also often infuriating. Donohue is obviously intelligent and seems to have chosen his life in the gutter. While one might honestly wonder why we should listen to a drunk who sleeps in ditches expound on esoteric economic theories, the quality of the writing and the power of the narrative carry the day. In the Open is a peculiar book that disturbs as it enlightens.Read More

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  • Product Description

    Compelling, raw, and painfully self-aware, In the Open describes an existence most people can barely imagine. A first-hand account of one man's struggle with homelessness and alcoholism, this diary records a world full of physical degradation and despair that is not without unpredictable moments of striking beauty.

    Donohue's experiences are brutal, but his perceptions are poetic. This account of an intelligent and sensitive man in the grip of alcoholism and homelessness challenges our perceptions of those on the margins of American contemporary life.

    "Donohue recorded this often-moving account during a four-year period of homelessness caused by his alcoholism. . . . There are many brilliant observations here on a range of topics, including human nature, technology, and capitalism. . . . Donohue's life on the fringe also provides an inside look at the homeless system of overnight shelters, labor offices, and food stamp providers. But, somehow, in spite of all the negatives, a hopeful book emerges."--Booklist

    "A startlingly original book. In this confessional age, Donohue's diary becomes a different sort of tell-all, a palimpsest that forces us to extract the author from his own writing. . . . Donohue comes to resemble Swift's Gulliver"--Nicholas Nesson, Boston Phoenix

    "Donohue punctuates his account of 'domiciling within the black walls of a mosquito-infested night' with rambling metaphysical asides in the style of an eighteenth-century philosophe."--Molly McQuade, Lingua Franca

    "Despite hunger, homelessness, dead-end jobs and abusive drinking, what is most striking about Donohue is his amazing optimism and endurance."--Patrick Markee, Nation

    "Donohue is a gifted writer. . . . But what gives [his diary] the breath of life is that it is written by an artist."--Alec Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  • 0226157679
  • 9780226157672
  • TE Donohue
  • 10 October 1996
  • Chicago University Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 210
  • 2nd
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