Good Books and Videos We Recommend
Welcome to the book and video review section of our website. In keeping with our vision to help 'Inform, Inspire and Involve' our visitors we have established this little cyber-corner of the website where we will regularly post book and video reviews of relevent and note-worthy books and videos, as well as maintain an extensive list of recommended authors and books/videos.
If you have come across a good book/video that you think we should know about please let us know.
STREET LAWYER
JOHN GRISHAM
WRITINGS
PHILIP YANCEY
VIDEO-SAINT OF FORT WASHINGTON
Rev.S.Brandt
Recommended Books and Authors
General List of Recommended Authors
Jean Vanier (Founder of L'Arche)
Henri Nouwen
Mother Teresa
Pat Caponni (Canadian homelessness, poverty, mental illness)
Barbara Murphy (Canadian, Ottawa, homelessness, poverty, mental illness)
Ray Baake
Anthony de Mello
Philip Yancy
Recommended Books and Videos
Title: On The Street: How We Created Homelessness
Author: Barbara Murphy
Themes: Homelessness in Canada, poverty, gentrification, de-institutionalization
Summary: This book is a scholarly treatment of the problem homelessness in Canada. Murphy, an expert in the field, provides much needed statistical information and insight in this balanced, well-reasoned and compassionate presentation.
Title: The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey
Author: Henri Nouwen
Themes: Personal journal, serving the needy
Summary: Henri Houwen left the fame and influence he had acquired in academic life at some of America's most reputable universities to serve as pastor and care-giver in a L'Arche home for the profoundly mentally disabled in Toronto. The Road to Daybreak is his personal journal over the one-year period leading up to this decision.
Title: Affluenza
Author: John deGraaf, David Wann and Thomas Naylor
Themes: North American Consumerism
Summary: Afflunza is a curable disease. This 236-page follow-up to the PBS documentaries "Affluenza" and "Escape from Affluenza" and divides its investigation of rampant overconsumerism into 3 parts.
Title: Upstairs in the Crazy House
Author: Pat Caponni
Themes: Mental illness in Canada after closure of mental institutions
Summary: Acclaimed author and social activist Pat Caponni writes of her time spent in a privately-run group home for mentally ill people in Toronto and the effects of Canada closing mental institutions and off-loading the responsibilities to local communities. A real eye-opener.
Title: Dispatches from the Poverty Line
Author: Pat Caponni
Themes: Poverty in Ontario after policies of Premier Mike Harris
Summary: Pat Caponni gives us a detailed day-by-day account of her life and rapid descent into poverty as an unemployed person living in Toronto during the early years of the radical policies of the Mike Harris Conservative government.
Title:[video] The Saint of Fort Washington 1993
Starring: Matt Dillon and Danny Glover
Themes:homelessness and mental illness
Summary:Unlike most Hollywood depictions of life on the streets this film realistically follows the friendship between a newly psychiatrically deinstitutionalized schizophrenic man and a Vietman post traumatically stressed homeless man trying to survive on the streets of N.Y.C. This is a thought provoking, disturbing and tenderhearted look at poverty.
Title:[video] The View from Here:Life on the Heater 1999
Contraband Productions directed by Thomas Mann
Themes:homelessness and addiction
Summary:During a typically fridgid Ottawa winter filmmaker Thomas Mann spent 24 hours in the lives of a group of men women and squeegie kids who just blocks away from Parliment Hill call a heating vent home. This documentary helps us see the homeless as real survivors trying to make the best of their circumstances
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