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During the Reagan years, homelessness went from as seldom-noticed social ill to a central poverty-related concern that demanded a national policy solution. In Seasons Such as These, the author argues that it was more than the increased numbers of Americans without homes that brought the issue of homelessness into the spotlight. As Bogard’s detailed narrative history and analysis demonstrate, homelessness was also “talked into being” through the accumulated efforts of several sectors of social actors, including advocates and activists, government officials, experts, and the media. The book traces the actions of these actors over that period, when homelessness developed into a social problem in America’s two “national cities — New York and Washington, D.C.

SEASONS SUCH AS THESE

Cynthia J. Bogard

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Cynthia Bogard does a masterful job of putting the pieces of the puzzle together. . . . The conception of context is one of many analytic insights gleaned from Seasons Such As These that are relevant to the construction of social problems in general, not just to the case of homelessness. . . . Bogard deserves credit for providing much-needed perspective on how our society has arrived at such a peculiar and perplexing place in its attempts to do something about homelessness.

Barrett A. Lee, Contemporary Sociology

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