Land of the Lost Souls

For the past sixteen years, Cadillac Man has lived on the streets of New York City. Over those years, he has recorded the facts of his daily life, writing hundreds of thousands of words in a series of spiral-bound notebooks. Land of the Lost Souls distills those journals into a memoir of homeless life, full of indelible characters and packed with gripping stories. In a gritty, poignant, and funny voice, Cadillac narrates his descent into homelessness, the struggles and unexpected freedoms of his life, and the story of his love affair with a young runaway, whom he eventually (and tragically) reunites with her family. Land of the Lost Souls is a book for the seven hundred thousand homeless people in the US whose stories remain on the streets, largely untold.

Praise

"Cadillac Man's story is grueling. His book is not. He works to put human faces on the men and women you see huddled under overpasses and in alleyways, and there are cracks of light in the tale he tells, even moments of joy, bravery and suspense."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

 

"[U]nnerving and powerful . . . an absorbing portrait of New York's homeless—from where they sleep and bathe to the violence and alcoholism that so often define their lives."—J. Courtney Sullivan, The New York Times Book Review

 

"After living on the street for some 13 years, [Cadillac Man] wrote the book on homelessness."—New York Daily News

"Compelling."—Time Out Chicago

"A rough road's turned into a sweet ride."—Esquire.com

"[F]rom first page to last, tragic, comic, dramatic, and emotionally charged. Cadillac Man describes his life on the streets in precise detail: how to survive, how to eat, how to keep clean and warm. His world is frequently bleak, naturally, but the bleakness is punctuated by moments of surprising humor and joy and by encounters with an assortment of strange and wonderfully interesting people . . . a vivid portrait of the life of a street person."—David Pitt, Booklist

 

"Writer, veteran and native Manhattanite Cadillac Man exposes the hidden world of the homeless in this riveting collection of stories from his sixteen years on the streets of New York City. . . . Excruciating details of fist-fights and romantic escapades leave little to the imagination, rendering Cadillac's world intimate, scary and touching; it becomes clear that his survival and sanity depend not only on crafty methods of making money, but also on journaling (excerpts from which have appeared in Esquire magazine). A surprising find, Cadillac lets readers in on a rarely seen community, revealing the compassionate hearts that beat even in the most despairing circumstances."—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

About the Author(s)

Cadillac Man

Cadillac Man was born in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan and has lived on the streets in four of New York’s five boroughs. His journals have been excerpted in Esquire magazine.