David Rochefort's From Poorhouses to Homelessness is a substantial addition to the mental health policy literature. To simply point out its engaging writing style and its thorough, scholarly coverage of the major issues in mental health policy would ignore its more important contributions. Rochefort brings both rigor and creativity to his coverage and synthesis of diverse perspectives on the major trends in mental health policy, providing a theoretical base, an international perspective, and sufficient detail to make it a key text for graduate and undergraduate students of public policy and human services. Nevertheless, I found that several of the areas warranted further development, and I would have approached several of the topics somewhat differently.