How to watch Tracy Kidder discuss “Rough Sleepers” at the L.A. Times Book Club

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder joined the L.A. Times Book Club on Jan. 26 to discuss his new book, “Rough Sleepers.”

You can watch Kidder’s live virtual conversation with Times columnist Steve Lopez on You Tube (updated link) and Twitter.

Kidder’s timely new book is a deeply researched exploration of the nation’s homeless crisis and the systematic failures behind it.

To write “Rough Sleepers,” Kidder spent more than five years riding with Dr. Jim O’Connell and the street team that navigates Boston in a van at night, providing medical care, wellness checks, socks and soup to the city’s unhoused population.

Author Tracy Kidder, left, with Dr. Jim O’Connell who founded Boston Health Care for the Homeless.

(Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Kidder is perhaps best known for “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” his 2003 book about Paul Farmer, the renowned infectious disease specialist who spent his life bringing modern medicine to the world’s poorest countries starting with Haiti.

At times, Kidder tells columnist Erika D. Smith, he felt as if he were back in Haiti while riding with O’Connell. The discarded and forgotten rough sleepers Dr. Jim tended in Boston — not unlike the discarded and forgotten rough sleepers of Los Angeles — were plagued by ailments that shouldn’t exist in a country with as much money and modern medicine as the United States.

On Thursday night Kidder was in conversation with Lopez, a Times columnist who has written often about homelessness in Los Angeles, and is the author of the bestseller “The Soloist,” about Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless musical prodigy Lopez met on Skid Row. His new book is “Independence Day.”

Nathaniel Ayers (left) and Yo Yo Ma chat at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2006. They attended Julliard together.

(Francine Orr)

“Rough Sleepers” is the book club’s January selection.

In February Brendan Slocumb will join book club readers to discuss his bestselling mystery, “The Violin Conspiracy,” with Times classical music critic Mark Swed. This virtual event will livestream at 6 p.m. PT Feb. 23. Sign up in advance on Eventbrite.

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