Customer Reviews

Surviving on the Streets: How to Go Down Without Going Out

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Truly inspiring account of life on the streets. Ace tells it like it us and doesn't sugarcoat or fabricate details to get better ratings. Although I have a permanent place to call home, I found his book very informational and helpful to all walks of life. A "dumpster diver" myself, I can't get enough of diving stories! People should be ashamed of themselves for all the waste they create! I take that back, bless the wasteful, selfish people of the world for giving my life a purpose! To all those found at the bottom of a can, I commend you for doing what you do! Keep up the good work Ace! You are my new hero! :)

Even if you've never been homeless, and have little chance of ever becoming homeless, you will still enjoy this book. Beyond it's "how-to guide" format, it's a great read on so many levels. First, it will make you think about your modern American existence in a whole new way. Secondly, it will give you an interesting counterpoint to whatever your current view is of the "homeless situation." Plus, Ace knows how to tell a story. Many of his anecdotes will have you laughing out loud...especially if you've ever spent any time in Berkeley. His likable personality shines through in his writing style, which is intelligent, sardonic, somewhat bitter, and witty.

Those who are using this review space to trash homeless people have obviously not read this book. Ace Backwords does not promote "free-loading," "trashing public property," or "scamming people." He writes about using your wits to survive, in an interesting and intelligent way.

Even if you don't agree with everything he has to say, you will still enjoy the book and want to talk about it with your friends. Read it, pass it on, and have an interesting conversation.

I've been an Ace Backwords fan since the days of his legendary "Twisted Image" comics. In this volume Ace tells us what it's REALLY like to be homeless in the Bay Area from personal experience. This is autobiography, not journalism or "participant observation," as the anthropologists call it.

Ace pulls no punches, describing both the horrors and the joys (yes, there are many) of living on the streets. His stories can be both touching and hillarious, and he offers lots of practical advice to people caught down on their luck. Some is very Politically Incorrect, but when you have to survive by your gut instincts, rhetoric ceases to be important. If you're looking for a portrayal of homelessness to reimforce your own thoughts on the problem, be they flaming liberal or neo-fascist, you WON'T find it here!

While Ace is strong on story-telling and practical advice, he's not so good at sociological analysis or epidemiology. Ace should research such matters a little more carefully before making blanket statements about cause and effect with social problems. One of the firs things on learns in Research 101 is "correlation does not necessarily indicate causation."

These problems aside, this is a great, quick read.

Surviving On The Street: How To Go Down Without Going Out by "street smart" author Ace Backwords is a straightforward, no-nonsense, "user friendly" guide to the rough realities of surviving without a home. From finding places to sleep, to coping with bad weather, to procuring food, to getting oneself off the street, Surviving on the Street is extremely practical. It is also an effective, informed and informative warning to the reader of the dangers to avoid, as well as offering the safe-at-home-yet-curious soul of what it really is like to be out there on the streets. With the rising numbers of homeless and "street people" in our cities and towns, Surviving On The Street is a strongly recommended addition to community library and community center reference collections.

I want address the VERY NAIVE and typical comments of the "doctor" who posted what he did earlier. Anyone who reads this book and has his typical high society yuppie left wing opinions will get their lunch eaten out there.

This is the most primitive environment in the U.S. and worse than prison unless you're in a security risk unit. That's about the best way to describe this life. Whatever you would figure life is like in prison it's like that on the streets except survival is often harder because there's so many rules and hawks that can prey on you. Ask anyone who is perfectly happy in jail where they lived before there........they'll tell you the street.

If you're an outsider and being white and from a upper middle class background not hip to the street you're going to be a serious target, not only are you easy prey but you represent (at your past) everything these people wish they had and dispise. A lot of the ____ is racial, like I mentioned earlier......it's a very primitive life. I'm from Texas and if you're a junkie and hang in a low income neighborhood most likely it will be a black community. This itself opens up trouble right off. You stick out, and I'm not racist and don't want to generalize either but any person's opinion of you right or wrong is your reality. If some black guys don't like you because you're white then you better know how to avoid trouble. Also on the street EVERYTHING is profiling and generalizations because your whole life is vunerable and you have to live it on gambles and vibes, the only way to do that is use profiling type tools. You don't have time to get someone's info as person or hire them for a job, this is YOUR LIFE AT RISK. You see someone who looks like a threat you'll have to know when to run in seconds flat.

For all the people against profiling and generalizing that's fine.........judging or treating people based on that is rude, considering in primitive environments is wise. People from the upperclass just don't understand. Another tip, the streets of cities like San Fran and Seattle are much different than most because the whole district only allows people to live there easily with money. It's their "liberal way" of keeping the "gang members" out. That's usually what minorities are referred to by their mannerly society. They don't have AS MANY predators lurking in large numbers in those cities and one or two others because cost is sky high. Most cities like LA, NYC, and others not even as big have many more concrete jungles.

I wrote this because yuppies have NO PERSPECTIVE on issues described in this book unless they've been there. They're way too sheltered to know. I don't care how high someone's IQ is or "family money" they have which is why most got to go to medical/law school in the first place, if you haven't been in that environment then you don't know.

Ace Backwards is a great writer, very funny and in his own way, a very brave, honest, patriotic American. I came across his Zine Twisted Image and corresponded with him in the early 1990s. He wrote about controversial issues like Holocaust Revisionism, the LA race riots after Rodney King, the first Gulf War against Iraq and Ace was very honest about writing who was behind that one leading up to this next one.

Does anyone know if Ace Backwards is alive? Well?

I read a memoir once by a Russian woman who happened to learn the prisoners' tapping code, never dreaming that one day she would be in solitary confinement with the tapping code her only lifeline to sanity. If I ever have the misfortune to be homeless, I'll be equipped with the insights and precepts of somebody with true street cred.
Ace Backwords went from "soft li'l suburban pup" to bum, so long ago, he says, that "homeless" hadn't yet become part of the consensus vocabulary. He's been homeless for shorter or longer periods ever since, one of the immense class of the emotionally displaced who feel like "an actor in the wrong movie" when confronted by the realities of contemporary American life.
In some ways the street tribe is like a big, dysfunctional family. Some are out there because they're crazy, others because it's the only way they know of staying sane. Many, says Ace, "find a sense of community and belonging on the streets that they've found nowhere else," which is a damn sad commentary on life in these United States.
Advice is here on self-defense; how to use time to your advantage; what you really need and what will only weigh you down; and the identity of your best ally. And con artists. They're easy to spot, Ace points out, because if they really possessed any expertise in their chosen field of hustling, "they'd be in the Senate attaching their parasitic tentacles to the public trough."
Ace takes a jaundiced view of the Sixties era, all its various revolutions, and its legacy. He looks at the basic philosophy of every brand of counterculture from then until now, and finds them all inadequate, especially the concept that alienation from society is a badge of honor.
Here's a really remarkable thing. All his advice for life on the streets also applies to those of us who are not homeless.
Ace Backwords is a guru for our times, as well as a great cartoonist. (Robert Crumb is one of his fans!) For years his work appeared in High Times and Maximum Rock'N'Roll and in countless zines. As an editor (Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics) my appetite for Ace Backwords material was insatiable. I've gone on record calling him a genius more than once, and when everybody else catches up I'll be saying "I told you so."

On his Geocities blog, Ace says that he enjoys negative feedback about his book, but I can't do that. I really liked what he had to say. His advice is relevant, helpful and honest. Homelessness often results in feelings of shame and embarrassment, but you can pull it off with dignity. If you are in serious danger of facing life on the streets, this book can help you avoid many pitfalls and a lot of pain. Thanks, Ace. My own advice would be to avoid other homeless people completely; join a gym where you can shower and keep a small locker, and hold a part-time job. Do not use drugs or engage in any prostitution.

I'm Ace's editor. I'd like you to know that his manuscript arrived typed on the blank sides of obviously scavenged paper, one chapter at a time, with months sometimes going by without any additional chapters or even any word from Ace. I would send letters trying to coax him back to writing, but he nearly chucked the whole project more than once. Eventually, another chapter would arrive. We knew we had an extraordinary book on our hands and did whatever we could to support him, but our offices are located two states away and short of going to Berkeley and combing the streets, there wasn't much we could do, nor would there have been much point. It was after all, a book about street life, complete with new wounds and old scars. The book is everything we were looking for and more. "For those of us who will never live on the streets, this book gives a brutally honest peek into an alien world from the eyes of a native. Fascinating!"

do NOT buy this book if you are looking for a how-to, or a manual, or even a lot of advice.

what you get here is a collection of personal anecdotes(which are interesting and amusing in their own right), personal opinion and politics (which are less interesting, and sometimes downright obtuse), and a scattered handful of advice.

you get more from forming your own opinions after reading about his experiences than you do from his actual advice. also, he tends to gloss over things you'd think were important, such as handling vagrancy tickets. how did ace overcome his tickets? he "jammed the machine with a blizzard of paperwork, and they forgot about it." ... yeah.

anyway, the sad fact is that not many books such as this exist, mainly because the kind of people who end up on the streets either never get their life together enough to write something (let alone get published), or have no interest in helping other people should they suffer the same fate.



in summary: interesting and amusing, but NOT informative.