Broken and Shared

Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity and the Poor on Los Angeles’ Skid Row is Jeff Dietrich’s first book, released by Marymount Institute Press in November 2011. It is available in soft cover form and is 418 pages in length. The text is an anthology of letters, photos, and essays, created over the past forty years. Many of the letters and essays first appeared in Los Angeles Catholic Worker's publication, Catholic Agitator.
Summary
For more than forty years Jeff Dietrich has worked on Los Angeles’ violent and decaying Skid Row providing more than three million meals to the homeless, while writing bi-monthly essays for the Catholic Worker newspaper, the Catholic Agitator. Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity and the Poor on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, is a journey through the best of these thoughtful, original and unsettling essays about the poor, and how our political and social system helps to maintain their poverty. The essays range from stories about the drama and sorrow of poverty in America to the poignant letters Dietrich wrote to his wife while in jail. Dietrich’s numerous acts of civil disobedience include pouring blood and oil on the Federal Building steps to protest the Persian Gulf War and blocking bathrooms in Los Angeles City Hall to show elected officials what it feels like to be on the street without porta-potties. He has landed in jail more than forty times.

With a forward by Martin Sheen and an introduction by Daniel Berrigan, Broken and Shared presents, by example, the selfless life of a brilliant writer and thinker, who has used the wisdom of the gospels as a template to live by. Dietrich has lived in solidarity with the poor and never compromised his beliefs in order to achieve comfort or material goods.
Broken and Shared is fully illustrated with archival photographs and artwork, with sixty-two images in all. Many of the illustrations originally appeared in the Catholic Agitator, though ten drawings, one for each of the sections of the book, were specially commissioned for its publication.

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