Those Who Wander

America's Lost Street Kids

By: Vivian Ho

Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller

Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins

Publisher's summary

Award-winning journalist Vivian Ho exposes a shattering true-crime story, shedding light on America’s new lost generation.

In 2015, the senseless Bay Area murders of twenty-three-year-old Audrey Carey and sixty-seven-year-old Steve Carter were personal tragedies for the victims’ families. But they also shed light on a more complex issue. The killers were three drifters scrounging for a living among a burgeoning counterculture population. Soon this community of runaways and transients became vulnerable scapegoats of a modern witch hunt. The supposedly progressive residents of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, only two generations removed from the Summer of Love, now feared all of society’s outcasts as threats.

In Those Who Wander, Vivian Ho delves deep into a rising subculture that’s changing the very fabric of her city and all of urban America. Moving beyond the disheartening statistics, she gives voices to these young people - victims of abuse, failed foster care, mental illness, and drug addiction. She also doesn’t ignore the threat they pose to themselves and to others as a dangerous dark side emerges. With alarming urgency, she asks what can be done to save the next generation of America’s vagabond youth.

©2019 Vivian Ho (P)2019 Brilliance Audio, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

"Former San Francisco Chronicle criminal justice reporter Ho takes to the streets of the Bay Area and other urban regions of the country to show readers how children are surviving on the streets without parental supervision, housing, or employment...[giving] readers an empathetic overview of life as a homeless youth in America." --Kirkus Reviews

“Ho searches for answers about the murders but also about the reasons so many kids end up on the street, and what can be done about it…Ho raises interesting questions that make this a successful starting point for an important conversation.” --Booklist

Reality Check

While reading it made me sad but it is always tough to face reality and glad that this journalist chronicled how the homeless lives.

great book, great narration

This book was Amazing, and I can only hope that it will open some eyes that have been blind either by choice, because its easier than truly looking at a very serious issue, or by genuine ignorance.

Thought provoking

I found that I enjoyed this book more than I expected. Although there are parts within that recount sad tales, there is also notes of hope and inspiration. The narration is really good thus bumping my rating here from what would have been a 4 to a 5 stars

good book All Around

I wasn't sure that I was going to like this book. I thought it was going to be more of boring statistics and stuff. But it was fascinating and engaging and the story of many lives.