Rooted in the ethnographic tradition, Bruce O'Neill's book serves as excellent documentary evidence on particular cases of homeless people in Bucharest. The work reflects experiences recorded by the author through direct observation of homeless people in a country where homelessness is a relatively new reality. During communism, Romania experienced no homelessness at all. Because very little (if any) memory of the pre-war condition remained in society, but homeless people became so visible after the communist collapse, that the phenomenon received the English name “homeleşi,” rather than acquiring any label in Romanian language.

O'Neill explores this situation and describe homeless people as seen from outside local society. In doing so, he completely ignores the local context in terms of housing policy, existing literature on homelessness, and poverty. This helps the author to provide an unbiased view of the reality as seen through his lens, with the risk of depriving the reader of knowledge about how other scholars understood the phenomena. A selection of his own photographic production nicely complements the text, stressing what the author considered as the most striking images of the depicted story.

Chapter by chapter the reader is introduced to the sad but still fascinating realm of people at the margins of a marginal European society. O'Neill provides a concise history of the impact of communism on housing stock in the first chapter. He complements this with treatment of the postcommunist transformation and an illustrative case of how the global economic crisis produced homelessness in Romania in conjunction with working in the construction sector, being male, and being Roma. O'Neill stresses ethnicity as a major risk factor for homelessness.

A short description of other circumstances that lead to homelessness (old age, disability, and events in the life cycle, such as divorce) offers the author the pretext to introduce the reader into the world of local shelters. Interviews with beneficiaries and providers are exploited. For the latter, the author mentions an Englishman that runs a shelter, a representative from the ministry in charge of housing (different from the one devoted to social protection), and a senior officer in the social protection department of the local town hall.

Two of the main red lines of the book become obvious, starting with this second chapter. One is the really valuable idea of time dilatation, which leads to boredom. Homelessness comes with a lot of time and a total lack of resources to use it. With the time passing, one gets trapped into boredom, and no exit is visible. The second common trait in these chapters and in the book as a whole is the backing of the findings with excerpts from selected novels and movies, as well as interviews with the creators of such fiction. Nevertheless, the choice of the method belongs to the author, who, unfortunately, never discusses its merits and drawbacks in the book.

The third chapter deepens the ideas stated in the second one, but changes the focus mainly to the case of retired homelessness, and how the elderly become the ones needing care in shelters. There is no obvious logic of chapter succession, and Chapter 4 simply provides new cases, further investigates the boredom of homelessness, and depicts some black-market recruitment strategies. Using the same pleasant, almost belletristic writing style as in the entire book, the fifth chapter discusses survival and life-style strategies: selling and buying same gender sex. A short note on gendered homelessness in Bucharest, and its sources, is also part of the chapter.

Chapter 6 indirectly challenges the boredom metaphor associated to homelessness, employed as leitmotiv in the book. O'Neill uses the opinion of a person from the advertising industry as illustration for a potential boredom habit at the national level, independent of homelessness. The author does not explicitly assume a position, but his book expounds on the explanations given in the cases presented through interview excerpts and the narration of life-stories. In several ways, boredom is generalized as being typical for the whole society, and it defines the main message of the text. O'Neill puts it clearly that time is just the pretext: “Boredom captures the inability to move beyond the sticky periphery in order to get caught up in globalism's smooth space of flows… .” (182). Such a conclusion is quite hasty, while its generalization avoids any triangulation. The same reliance on the opinions of a single person as the main source is specific to the entire book, reducing its capacity to suggest reliable explanations. The study becomes a good starting point for debates, however, and the book contributes documentary material for what was reality in Romania at the end of the 2000s.