Humans: The Book

                                                                                                                                                                       Brandon Stanton

"I got out of prison a month ago."

   "What were you in for?"

   "Selling drugs."

   "So what are you doing now that you're out?"

   "Trying to be an average Joe. But it's tough. I used to have all this money, now I can't buy a thing. Nobody wants to hire me. I've got tattoos. I've got a rap sheet. I feel like I'm in this giant hole and I don't know how to climb out."

Back in April, I shared a link to a really lovely website called Humans of New York (http://somanyinterestingthings.blogspot.com/2013/04/zoo-york-and-boston-too.html), in which one Brandon Stanton posts pictures of the people he meets on the street and adds some information about them, usually short transcripts of their conversation. Admittedly, his punctuation is a bit idiosyncratic and it takes a while to get used to it (especially for a grammar fiend like me, and in the excerpt above, I took the liberty of using the more traditional approach), but it's totally worth it.
      Good news ~ well, not "news," really, as it came out in October: Stanton, a Georgia native and former bond trader with no formal training in photography, has published a book version of his site: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/business/media/humans-of-new-york-by-brandon-stanton.html?_r=0