O[New Book Review]

Last Stop: A Survivor’s Tale

by Nelson Valez and Tommy McInnis, on Amazon.com, Xlibris.com

Reviewed by Reviewer Rob

This book’s about a real story of real people doing an important job in a real city, “The City.” New York is an amazing place. Nowhere else can you get the full spectrum of the human experience combined in one strip of real estate. There are larger, more populated metro centers, but none with the range of citizenry. Tommy McInnis and Nelson Valez worked the unkind streets of NYC assisting its most vulnerable and unlucky, the homeless. McInnis, now an EMT, was an MTA Connections outreach worker and Valez was an NYPD Transit Police Officer working the Homeless Outreach Unit. This book, written in the gritty street parlance of the town that fans of Law And Order have come to love, documents their story. It’s good to see a the tale told from this perspective. McInnis was once homeless but turned his fortune around. Too many people glance past the forgotten of society. It’s easy to say they live that way because they want to, that they deserve to because they choose that lifestyle due to drugs, alcohol or negative mental temperament. The homeless here in San Diego are a growing section of the community, with whole families sent curbside because of corrupt lending practices in the real estate mortgage industry. Here the homeless come west if they’re close to the coast. Interstate 10 dead ends at the beach and then it’s “OK, everyone off the bus, last stop!” This book provides at least one person’s answer to the question, “Where do you go from there?” [Xlibris.com] RR

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