Dr. Sheldon Jacobs Spots His Own Book

When your wife is a book junkie and you spend date night at the bookstore and you see your own book on the shelf.

My book is not just any book. It is an experience that details my 48 hours living on the streets from a few years ago. Unfortunately, there are scores of unsheltered people across the world but I am happy to know that more people will have access to read my book to better understand the unimaginable journeys of so many people.

You can purchase Dr. Jacobs's book, 48: An Experiential Memoir on Homelessness, here or at another bookseller near you!

Why Books?

When I think about how books have impacted my life, I think of a perfect smile on a hot, sunny

day, on a nameless dirt road that ran through a nameless village in northeast Afghanistan. We

were on what was called a “presence patrol.” A simple mission. Let the Taliban know we were

there. Wearing our salt-crusted uniforms, big guns, and weary eyes, we spread out through the small settlement. I stood with our interpreter under the shade of a tree just off the road, scanning a football-field sized orchard between traditional-styled mud houses.

A ten-year old little girl smiled at me. She was with a melee of other kids both older and

younger. She wore a backpack and clung to a heap of books cradled in her arms. She had

honeycomb-colored eyes speckled with jade flakes and a smile worth fighting for. She stopped to show me her collection of books, beaming like she’d just won the lottery. I asked the interpreter to find out why she and the other kids weren’t in school.

“The Taliban came into our school house. They said to go home now because there was going to be a fight,” she said through the interpreter.

She continued to show me those books and goggle over them, like bullets weren’t about to start ripping the air around us to whining shreds. Finally, the other kids grabbed her and fled.

Books can’t make you free, but they can give you a taste... a glimpse... a feeling. And the result... that smiling girl clinging to those books like she was holding the cure for cancer, like keys to every locked door, the answers to all of her war-torn country’s problems.

Maybe she was.

Why Books?

I learned to read when I was six, late by today’s helicopter-parenting standards and perhaps

surprising considering my surroundings. My parents were avid readers; I grew up in a house

filled with books. English was not my first language, so I may have struggled with the learning

process, but I don’t remember this problem.

What I do remember: sitting at a desk in my first-grade classroom, staring at the rectangular-

shaped workbook that was supposed to usher me into the world of reading. I remember the

frustration. I wanted to make sense of the words on the book cover. I wanted to turn the pages and read the stories that inspired the images. I didn’t want to be read to; I wanted to read for myself, and I could not. I fretted; I would never learn. I asked myself: why was it so hard for me?

These thoughts say more about my tendency to catastrophize than anything else, for, of course, I did learn to read, and once I did, I didn’t stop. I fit all the reading clichés of the little girl at the library, piling up books for empty summer days, long car trips, lonely recesses. I loved bookstores as much as toy shops. Books were, and still are, my favorite gift.

Reading was a hobby, a pastime, entertainment. Reading was also a lifeline. A friend observed, “Maria responds to a problem by finding a book.” I guess that’s true. Sometimes that book is self-help or pop-science, but other times it’s a novel or a memoir or a collection of poetry. Sometimes the book provides an escape and other times it might provide a frame to make a problem manageable or a lens through which to find understanding. Sometimes I find

consolation in understanding I am not alone.

Over the years, I have read my way through joys, struggles, and loss, finding on those pages

distraction, inspiration, strength. Numerous times, a book I didn’t know I needed managed to

find its way to me. Maybe someone gave it to me; maybe I found it featured in a bookstore, or I picked it off my own shelf, surprised to find something new.

The sight of books comforts me; libraries, bookstores, offices crammed with lined bookshelves are my safe spaces. I’m not bothered by the piles of donated books in my office, in my car, in bins on my back porch. Instead, I look at those books and consider the possibilities.

So why books?

One reason –

I hope each book we collect finds its way to the person who needs to read it. I hope that reading this book will bring comfort, hope, and promise, whatever that person, that reader, needs at that moment.