Sweet Street

Every city has a Sweet Street. You know it when you see it: the neon signs, the strip clubs, the honky-tonk bars, the sidewalks that come alive after midnight. Most people hurry past. Jack Olsen went in.

In the early 1970s, Olsen embedded himself in the bars and strip clubs of San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, spending months among the hustlers, pimps, strippers, waitresses, bartenders, bouncers, junkies, cops, and club owners who inhabited this shadow economy. He listened to their stories. He asked how they got there, how they survived, and what they wanted from lives that most of polite society preferred not to acknowledge.

What emerged is a vivid, compassionate, and often startling piece of oral history journalism, a book that gives voice to people rarely given the chance to speak for themselves. Their stories range from darkly comic to genuinely heartbreaking. Beneath the neon and the noise, Olsen found a fully formed social world with its own hierarchy, its own code of conduct, and its own version of the American Dream.

Sweet Street is not a book of judgment. It is a book of listening. And in the tradition of the great oral historians, it captures a world and a moment in time that no longer exist quite the way they did then.

New York Times bestselling author Jack Olsen, known for his psychological depth and journalistic precision, turns those same gifts toward a world most writers of his stature never bothered to enter.
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