Daily Bread
A Portrait of Homeless
Men & Women of
Lenawee County, Michigan
By Jennifer Burd with Photographs by Lad Strayer
Published 2009 by Bottom Dog Press
Perfect Bound, 83 PP, $15.00
ISBN 978-1-933964-26-3
Reviewed by David Blaine
Daily Bread is a book on a mission. We’ve all heard “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” or “Walk a mile in the other person’s shoes.” but in our hectic society it’s far too easy to stereotype the people we meet each day.
These pairings of Lad Strayer’s black and white photographs and Jennifer Burd’s written word mosaics serve as a tool or key, putting a name with a face and helping us to know some of Michigan’s homeless on a personal level.
Burd’s writing is direct and effective, but she remains in the background. Her writing is always about the person she’s interviewing, letting them tell their own story. The fact that this book comes from a series originally written for a newspaper is not lost on the reader. And that is equally true of the photographs, which are candid and gripping.
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying that there are no strangers, only friends we haven’t met yet. In Daily Bread, Burd and Strayer introduce us to a few new friends. We meet a diverse group of people who are homeless for a wide variety of reasons, and we discover that they are often as interesting, kind, wise and enterprising as anyone else we’ve had the pleasure to meet.
The object of this book isn’t to exhaustively educate anyone on the subject of the homeless. It does effectively provide insight so readers may effect a paradigm shift in their thinking and attitudes. And it does this with compassion and caring for both reader and subject. I feel better off for meeting the people in this book and encourage you to purchase a copy of Daily Bread soon.
Jennifer Burd is a writer and editor at HighScope Educational Research Foundation in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Lad Strayer is a photojournalist with The Daily Telegram in Adrian, Michigan
David Blaine,
Author of “Antisocial” (Outsider Writers Press, 2009)
works in the family hardware business in Port Sanilac, Michigan
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