Travels With Lizbeth

Rating:
Summary: home is where the dog is
Review: Engaging and largely unsentimental account of being one of the itenerant homeless, with the added complication of having a dog. The author does not anthropomorphize Lizbeth which is the best decision he could make. Rather than a heartwarming story straight out of "Touched by An Angel" we get a complex picture of his world: the various hitchhikers, Good Samaritans, petty bureacrats and lost souls who, through reasons besides simple irresponsiblity, happen to find themselves on the streets. Luckily, the chronicle has a happy ending, but it feels earned and not fake.

Rating:
Summary: A suprisingly engaging account of homelessness
Review: I don't often read non-fiction, but I was enchanted by Travels with Lizbeth by Lars Eighner. It's about threeyears in the life of a homeless man and his dog. Before being on the streets he was a writer/mental healthworker (he wrote gay porn, among other things, to make money). His style is really remarkable-mannered and wry. It's as though he were educated at Oxford and one day found himself on the streets of Austin, TX without any prospects to speak of. His adventures are poignant, funny, tragic, and even occasionally sexy. You'll walk away with an appreciation for a category of homelessness, the situationally homeless, that often gets overlooked. We're always quick to categorize people on the streets as either: substance abusers, mentally ill, or simply homeless by choice. But some people just lose it. Eighner loses it, but ultimately makes the most of it. When I finished the book, I just wanted to send him money in case his luck had changed again.

Rating:
Summary: an entertaining, informative read
Review: I live in Austin and so I am familiar with a lot of the places mentioned in the book. Austin is currently (and was becoming at the time of publication) an economically prosperous city with it's much touted high-tec industries and growing affluence. Of course not everyone benefits from the growing economy and this book shows that there are some that do not benefit at all. The experiences of living on the streets of Austin and the southwest with a dog are told with great humor and wit. The fact that this book is very well written suggests that Lars Eighner doesn't fit the usual homeless stereotype of being ignorant, uneducated and useless to society. In fact in the book Eighner mentions having regular job before his circumstances changed. It does make one wonder how many other people are out there who go through similar experiences in life. anyway, this book is definitely worth a read.

Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: Lars Eighners book, "Travels with Lizbeth" is an account of homelessness, written in the elegant style of another era. It is almost as though Robinson Crusoe, instead of being cast up on a desert island, instead found himself, with his faithful dog companion, stranded on the streets and highways of the American southwest. The strange characters, the improbable events, and the philisophical musings on his state, make Eighner a true character, and one is amazed that he was able to climb out of that morass, though perhaps not for long, as Eighner once again is living on the edge of homelessness. One can't help but chuckle about his accounts of the weird people he encounters, made all the more interesting by his sexual orientation (he is gay).

Rating:
Summary: Really Provides a Different Perspective
Review: This book was very interesting. It totally deconstructs dominant ideas that most people have concerning the homeless. Very rich in detail and was a pleasure to read.

Rating:
Summary: Not the Whole Truth
Review: This is a mildly amusing but disappointing book about a gay, homeless person. He lives in Austin with his dog, Lizbeth, then hitchhikes to Los Angeles, then hitchhikes back to Austin. There he stays for a few years, living as a bum, and getting his food from dumpsters. He is a dumpster diver.

He's a smart guy, and many of his observations are sharp. He talks about how alcoholism and drug addiction are the scourge of many of his kind, how he manages to feed, bathe, and clothe himself, and where he stays and sleeps. He's fair in his observations; never bitter or resentful towards those who have things.

And he is a man of principle. He will not beg, or steal. He doesn't drink, or do any kind of drugs. He always tries to keep himself clean, and he makes great sacrifices for his dog, whom he loves. The problem is, he is not entirely forthcoming about his sexual life.

For example, during his first hitchhiking excursion to Los Angeles, he tells us of getting a ride just outside of Tuscon, during which he earned "five dollars." To earn this money he had to continue the ride a few miles beyond a truck stop, and he commented that from this he learned that it was always best to hitchhike from a truckstop, rather than several miles beyond it. But how did he earn this five dollars? He doesn't say until much later in the book, when he mentions that he "turned a trick." And this is it.

But what exactly does he mean by this? I guess it doesn't take to much imagination to figure it out, but why doesn't he come out and say so? On this first trip he also gets a ride from Darrell, who turns out to be a cigarette thief. After travelling with this fellow for a while, it becomes clear to him in an unspoken way that Darrell would be willing to accept him as a partner. The author declines, explaining that although he was "attracted to Darrell," the kind of life he was leading was too dangerous. But what does this "attractive" business mean? Was Darrell gay also? Did they have some kind of relationship?

Oh, he talks about his relationships occasionally, but only in an offhand, brief manner. Once he mentions being concerned about the police after enjoying a "noisy threesome" in the park. Another time he mentions missing the encounters he formerly had with men he met in a public restroom since closed.

Believe me, I'm not particularly interested in the lurid details, but here is a guy who is principled in many ways, yet it seems he will engage in sex with just about anybody at anytime; he had done so at least once for money, and he had done so at least once with more than one man. Is this typical? My limited information of the subject tells me that it is, but I really don't know, and the author clearly does not wish to spell this out. Why not?

Therefore, and despite many good qualities, the book is ultimately dishonest, and one leaves it feeling cheated.

Rating:
Summary: home is where the dog is
Review: This is one of my favorite memoirs. It reads less like an autobiography than a collection of related short stories, each one witty, poignant, and carefully drawn.

It also serves as bracing lesson, not so much about "homelessness", but about how even an uncommonly intelligent and capable, if somewhat non-standard, person can slip through what's left of our social safety net and end up on the street. As Eighner tells it here, if it weren't for a couple of strokes of random good fortune, he would not have been a position to put a roof over his head again, much less publish this book.

For those wondering what Eighner is up to now, he's still writing. Examples of his recent and not-so-recent work can be found on his website, which can be easily found by putting "Lars Eighner" in a search engine. As for the reviewer who felt cheated because the book did not offer sufficient details of Eighner's sex life, there's a link to Eighner's erotic writing on the site as well -- that ought to satisfy your cruelly frustrated needs.