Awards

• Short-listed for Helen Bernstein Book Award 1999

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9780375753824

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Reviews

A gripping narrative . . . Finnegan's real achievement is to attach identities to the steady stream of faceless statistics that tell us America's social problems are more serious than we want to believe. --The Washington Post <br> For years, Bill Finnegan, a masterful reporter, has immersed himself in the world of the young and the lost. The reports he brings from four corners of the country, four desperate corners, will tell you more about the drug problem and more about what ails America than any other book I know of. Cold New World is chilling and dark, but it also vibrates with life. --David Remnick

A gripping narrative . . . Finnegan's real achievement is to attach identities to the steady stream of faceless statistics that tell us America's social problems are more serious than we want to believe. --The Washington Post Finnegan's book, a status report on the American Dream, gets its power the way a good novel does: from sheer story--the unpredictable, rich specifics of people's lives. Alas, every syllable of the book rings true. --Time [Finnegan's] stories do not concern a trial of the century, a perfect storm or the ascent of a tall mountain. Instead, they are about powerless people left battered and grounded by an economy that may be richly rewarding the educated, but is cruelly punishing many others. . . . The cumulative effect is to create an unusual kind of sympathy for the characters he describes. It's not the stereotypical liberal sense of pity. Rather, Finnegan convincingly connects the wayward events in these people's lives to the messages and forces they detect around them. --The New York Times Book Review Unlike most journalists who drop in for a quick interview and fly back out again, Finnegan spent many weeks with families in each community over a period of several years, enough time to distinguish between the kind of short-term problems that can beset anyone and the longer-term systemic poverty and social disintegration that can pound an entire generation into a groove of despair. --Los Angeles Times Book Review The most remarkable of William Finnegan's many literary gifts is his compassion. Not the fact of it, which we have a right to expect from any personal reporting about the oppressed, but its coolness, its clarity, its ductile strength. . . . Finnegan writes like a dream. His prose is unfailingly lucid, graceful, and specific, his characterization effortless, and the pull of his narrative pure seduction. --The Village Voice Cold New World is a sustained and unflinching look into the lives of young Americans who live in poverty of varying kinds: economic, social, intellectual, spiritual. . . . Part of the appeal of this gathering of life-portraits and firsthand revelations is that Finnegan can so adroitly place himself in the center of Cold New World as its brooding conscience-stricken, and culturally privileged witness even as he allows his subjects the full range of their mercurial humanity. Despite its pessimism, Cold New World is brimming with a quickened, heated life and surprises of the sort adolescents invariably provide their astonished elders. --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books Four astonishingly intimate and evocative portraits. . . . All of these stories are vividly, honestly and compassionately told. . . . While Cold New World may make us look in new ways at our young people, perhaps its real goal is to make us look at ourselves. --The Philadelphia Inquirer Finnegan is our Alexis de Tocqueville, teaching us locals something new about ourselves and our community by telling us the enduring human stories that defy stereotypes. --New Haven Advocate This book should be read by every parent. It should be read by every voter. It should be read and memorized by every policy-, aler/ Read it now, or live it later. --The San Diego Union-Tribune A beautifully written but sobering book . . . bringing a historical and generational weight of detail to [its] chapters that reminds one of J. Anthony Lukas' best journalism. --San Francisco Chronicle Book Review For years, Bill Finnegan, a masterful reporter, has immersed himself in the world of the young and the lost. The reports he brings from four corners of the country, four desperate corners, will tell you more about the drug problem and more about what ails America than any other book I know of. Cold New World is chilling and dark, but it also vibrates with life. --David Remnick

A beautifully written, poignant journey through America's growing poverty class and the adolescents who wander without direction through this dreary landscape. Finnegan's fine narrative of life in these troubled times is a good counterweight to the blather many politicians will offer this election season about the necessity of caring for our children. A writer for the New Yorker, where portions of this book have appeared, Finnegan (Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid, 1986, etc.) traveled across America, landing in four geographically distinct and yet - as he aptly shows - spiritually similar spots. Among the telling portraits of individuals is Terry Jackson, a 15-year-old New Haven, Conn., drug dealer who tries to use his ill-gotten profits to buy himself a certain degree of security and self-esteem. San Augustine County, Tex., residents are forever changed by a large-scale but ultimately questionable drug raid. In Yakima Valley, Wash., Mexican-American adolescents struggle to find themselves in a culture vastly different from that of their working-class parents. And, finally, the author offers a chilling portrait of anomie and violence among teenage skinheads in the downwardly mobile Antelope Valley in northern Los Angeles County. The reasons for these teens' dislocation are myriad, and include the abdication of parental roles, unequal educational opportunities, and racism. But even more, Finnegan blames deindustrialization and the need for mothers to leave home and work. Finnegan excoriates welfare reform, which is forcing additional millions of poor mothers into the paid work force, and leaving their children adrift. A bleak conclusion indeed. But what could have been a desolate story instead is given power and depth by Finnegan's smooth prose and his insightful asides as he shares these young people's lives. A perspicacious, compellingly written tale of young people for whom the future holds little, if any, promise. (Kirkus Reviews)

A gripping narrative . . . Finnegan's real achievement is to attach identities to the steady stream of faceless statistics that tell us America's social problems are more serious than we want to believe. --The Washington Post<br><br> For years, Bill Finnegan, a masterful reporter, has immersed himself in the world of the young and the lost. The reports he brings from four corners of the country, four desperate corners, will tell you more about the drug problem and more about what ails America than any other book I know of. Cold New World is chilling and dark, but it also vibrates with life. --David Remnick

Author Information

William Finnegan is the author of Cold New World, A Complicated War, Dateline Soweto, Crossing the Line, and Barbarian Days. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987, he lives in Manhattan.

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