Unsheltered Love: Homelessness, Hunger and Hope in a City under Siege

by Traci Medford-Rosow

Overview

A story about hope and how every one of us can make a difference.

Unsheltered Love is a first-hand reported account of how the pandemic greatly exacerbated an already dire homelessness situation in New York City. 

In March 2020, the usually crowded streets of Midtown Manhattan were empty, stores were closing, people were afraid to go out. But homeless people were still on the streets, cold and very hungry, and much less able to panhandle in the deserted city. 

Unable to ignore their suffering, the author and her husband started walking the empty streets in their neighborhood, handing out food to the men and women they met. As they showed up, trust replaced the fear and suspicion that had existed within them, as well as within the homeless people they befriended. They listened as the homeless revealed their daily struggles living on the streets, as well as the details that had led to their homelessness. 

Unsheltered Love also provides an in depth look at one of the ten characters in the story—a homeless woman named Maggie Wright who adds her perspective to the narrative. Following each chapter is a journal entry written by Maggie—her viewpoint of the same events in the story, as well as an inside look at her personal journey into homelessness and her rise out of it. Her entries provide a look into the psychology of homelessness, what can lead a person to this fate, and more importantly, bind them to it. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631959820
Publisher:	Morgan James Publishing
Publication date:	03/14/2023
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,085,053
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Traci Medford-Rosow is the bestselling author of two previously published books. The first, Inflection Point: War and Sacrifice in Corporate America (Pegasus Books, 2015) and the second, Unblinded: One Man’s Courageous Journey through Darkness to Sight (Morgan James, 2018), which is a USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Indie Bound, Amazon and Barnes and Noble bestseller. Unblinded received a starred review from Kirkus and was named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2020, one of only seven titles in the memoir genre to make the prestigious annual list of 100 books. 

Traci is currently a partner in the New York City law firm Richardson & Rosow. Previously, she worked at Pfizer as Senior VP and Chief Intellectual Property Counsel, Global Head of IP Litigation and General Counsel of Europe. She is the founder of the College Education Milestone Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping high-performing students attend college.

Traci has made numerous guest appearances on radio shows, podcasts, and at book signings. She lives in New York City with her husband. They have two adult children. 

Editorial Reviews

01/27/2023

Medford-Rosow (Unblinded: One Man's Courageous Journey Through Darkness to Sight) relates the stories of several people in New York City who were homeless at the start of the COVID pandemic. In March 2020, the author and her husband noticed the increased number of unhoused people living on the streets of their New York City neighborhood. Concerned about their survival, Medford-Rosow brought them sandwiches regularly and gradually befriended several. She tells each person's story, focusing on how they came to be homeless and the efforts to find them social services and a room. The stories of the unhoused people are contrasted with events from the author's own life, demonstrating that the circumstances that cause people to lose their homes are not uncommon. At the end of each chapter, Maggie Wright, one of Medford-Rosow's unhoused friends, gives her perspective on the chapter's events, providing additional insight. The author ponders the impact that the first year of the pandemic and New York City's COVID policies had on the unhoused population. VERDICT A moving account of the experience of unhoused people in a major American city.—Rebekah Kati

Library Journal

2022-12-15
A New Yorker connects with her unhoused neighbors in this memoir.

Medford-Rosow’s story of developing meaningful personal relationships with houseless people who spent their days near her Manhattan home is effectively a 2020 time capsule. It recounts the changes that Covid-19 brought to New York City and offers a humane account of the realities that people without housing face. The sudden shutdown of many local businesses in March 2020 meant that local panhandlers had few donors, so Medford-Rosow and her husband, Joel, began taking daily walks through their neighborhood, first offering people dollar bills and then homemade sandwiches. Over time, they developed close relationships with several people, got to know their stories, and supported them as they tried to move into sheltered housing. Medford-Rosow connected most deeply with a woman who served as this book’s developmental editor and contributed short essays to the text under the pseudonym Maggie Wright; in them, she writes about the same events as the author but from her own perspective. In these pages, Medford-Rosow writes about emotional moments with an admirable lack of sentimentality. Throughout, she takes pains not to portray herself and Joel as heroic—for instance, she still worries that the city’s plan to use nearby hotels as shelters will hurt local property values—and she offers no broad policy recommendations. Instead, Maggie’s personal journey, with its many setbacks and successes, serves as the book’s core, and it’s an effective one; her middle-class background and struggles with addiction are likely to resonate with many readers. The book also does an effective job of evoking the uncertainty of the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, from the initial assumptions that offices would only be closed briefly to phases of reopening to premature claims of victory as the first wave receded.

A focused and engaging remembrance of a specific community changed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Kirkus Reviews