Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country Book

The United States has always been a land of marked contrasts, but never more so than now. While newspapers talk of the longest economic boom in memory, increasingly played out in cyber-reality, there is a physical reality out there that grows apace with disturbing results. The poor are the American Dream's underbelly, its bastard offspring. Few have shown the courage to examine it, but award-winning New Yorker journalist William Finnegan has, and his book, the result of eight years research, demands to reach an audience more used to picking up the new Bill Bryson. Finnegan concentrates on four families, from throughout the United States; two are black, one is Mexican, one is white, but a grinding poverty unites them, seeming to thwart any of their attempts to drag themselves from a relentless cycle of crime, drugs and gangs. He describes one street scene in New Haven as "an Edward Hopper painting reworked by Anselm Kiefer". but he does not pass through, taking vox-pops; he stays around the people for long periods, popping back over the years. His unflinching prose is magnificently serious and painfully sentient, burning with an anger (partly his), but always perceiving a humanity despite itself. The fractured characters he meets, such as Terry, the drugs dealer who dreams of owning a restaurant, or Mindy, with her White Supremacist boyfriend, represent a splinter in the Achilles Heel of the Dream, rejecting its promises for a narcotic reverie that feeds an alternative economy of warped extremes. Sociological studies like this have precedents, such as Jack London's turn-of-the-century "People of the Abyss", about London's East End. That abyss still yawns. Finnegan provides a scorchingly involving chronicle of a grave new world in which the structure of government and its enforcers see no worth, but which consequentially continues to swell. Brilliantly researched and urgently relevant, "Cold New World" presents a "now" embodying the legacy of "then", and it is shocking. --David VincentRead More