The book market is awash just now with what might be called post-Trump travel books. These are books in which the authors advance arguments about politics and policy, and attempt to reify those arguments by querying people in far-flung places in various states of collapse or disrepair—rural wastelands, dying towns, crime-wracked cities from which industries have fled.
"This book is not a book about 'how we got Trump,' " Chris Arnade writes in the introduction to his collection of photographs, "Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America" (Sentinel, 284 pages, $30), "though learning to see the country differently may help answer questions about the 2016 election. Rather, it's a book about reconsidering what is valuable, about honoring aspects of life that cannot be measured, and about an attempt to listen and look with humility."
Mr. Arnade was a Wall Street bond trader in the 2000s and lived a comfortable life in Brooklyn, N.Y. He began taking long walks to relieve stress, he recalls, and found himself exploring New York's roughest places—especially Hunts Point in the Bronx. In 2012 he left his job and spent the next two years interviewing and photographing the neighborhood's vagrants and drug addicts. He gave them small sums of cash, took them to and from hospitals, gave them lifts to court hearings and let them text their friends with his phone. Mr. Arnade's photographs of his transient subjects are starkly beautiful, but he does not romanticize them or claim any moral victory for himself. After two years of visiting Hunts Point, "nobody got clean or sober." The only way anybody left the streets, he says, is by being thrown into prison, mandated to rehab or killed.
Read Full Article »