Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country [Hardcover]

William Finnegan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 1998

In this groundbreaking work of social journalism, a spotlight is cast on a population we find it easy, or convenient, to overlook.
"While the national economy has been growing, the economic prospects of most Americans have been dimming," William Finnegan writes.
"A new American class structure is being born--one that is harsher, in many ways, than the one it is replacing.
Some people are thriving in it, of course. This book is about some families who are not. More particularly, it's about their children who are teenagers
and young adults, about their lives and times, how they speak and act as they try to find their way in this cold new world.
Finnegan spent time with families in four communities across America and became an intimate observer of the lives revealed in these beautifully
rendered portraits: A fifteen-year-old drug dealer in blighted New Haven, Connecticut. A sleepy Texas town transformed when crack arrives.
Mexican American teenagers in Washington State, unable to relate to their immigrant parents and trying to find an identity in gangs. Jobless young white
supremacists in a downwardly mobile L.A. suburb.
This is a book about race, class, and social change that never loses sight of its subjects' humanity. The kids in these pages are complex,
multifaceted individuals, alternately sympathetic and frustrating, as richly drawn and compelling as characters in a novel. At the same time,
Finnegan's journalism goes beyond reportage as he lays bare the economic trends and political decisions that have created this harsher America--
a country where inequality and cultural alienation grow at a dangerous pace. Important, powerful, and compassionate, Cold New World gives us an
unforgettable look into a present that presages our future.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"When I first started going to New Haven," writes William Finnegan, "I was taken on a tour of the city's neighborhoods by two black residents. Their conversation reminded me of others I've heard--in countries suffering from chronic guerrilla war."

Cold New World depicts the lives of American teenagers and young adults, struggling to hang onto what little they've got. They are part of a growing underclass whose lives have become saturated with drugs and violence. Whether he's talking to an African American drug dealer who plies his trade in the shadow of Yale or a young woman caught up in the feud between two rival skinhead gangs in the northernmost suburbs of Los Angeles, Finnegan brings his subjects to life on the page with a compassion that doesn't undermine any of his bluntness about their desperate conditions. You may not like what Cold New World has to say about the state of the nation, but it's a book that you ignore at your peril.

From Publishers Weekly

Finnegan, a staff writer for the New Yorker, here functions as both a messenger and as a journalist His message is that America is raising a new generation of young people shaped by an "oppressive sense of reduced possibilities." If that phrase smacks of sociological jargon, the book itself does not because of Finnegan's unobtrusive reportorial style that combines intuition with insight and fieldwork. While in the past 25 years poverty among the elderly has dropped by more than 50%, it has increased by 37% among children, notes the author. To find out what that means in human terms, he met with young people in four impoverished or lower-middle-class communities: the black slums of New Haven, Conn.; rural San Augustine County in Texas; the Yakima Valley in Washington, where the economy relies on underpaid Mexican labor; and Antelope Valley in California, a distant suburb of Los Angeles caught up in a struggle between warring bands of teenage skinheads. From each community, Finnegan draws vivid portraits of individuals caught between a sense of despair that they can never achieve the good life and an almost utopian dream that they can somehow break through to the middle class. The struggle between gangs is probably the most arresting section of the book, but the level of grim insight throughout will disturb the optimism of a healthy economy supposedly reflected in Wall Street's rising numbers. This book is a vibrant eye-opener.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 421 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (May 12, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679448705
• ISBN-13: 978-0679448709
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,370,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Dark Side of America, November 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country (Hardcover)

Having read several of these sociological "Real World" missives, "Cold New World" is by far the most comprehensive. Whereas works like "Code of the Street" and "The Corner" examine a single distressed area, William Finnegan's work is very ambitious in exploring problems in New Haven, rural Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and Southern California.

Finnegan shows how faulty American public policy has ravaged the nation. The book is tightly written, provides meaningful analysis, and it's scope extends across the entire American ethnic mix.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Startling, Hard-Edged Look At The "Other America", July 30, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country (Hardcover)

In the midst of all the self-congratulatory celebrations marking the closing of the millennium, few affluent Americans seem aware or concerned of the innate contradictions and dysfunctions associated with the circumstances of their own affluence, or of the associated disparities, disjunctions, and despair of millions of younger Americans who are not fortunate enough, affluent enough, or politically-enfranchised enough to gain a technical or college education, and are nowhere to be found in the minions of highly paid and technicolored attired young nerds and nerdettes now running amok in the suburban malls and internet sites of mainstream America. This superbly written book by noted journalist William Finnegan details the dark side of the American Dream as we proceed into the new century.

Finnegan does not deny that a conspicuous minority of our younger citizens are finding themselves fabulously fortunate, preoccupied with drowning themselves in the material excesses too many of us wallow in, but it is to the other, less-chronicled segment of the twenty-something generation that he brings his considerable talents and insights, and he weaves a fascinating, fulsome, and frightening narrative around a series of personal anecdotes and experiences of teenageers and young adults trapped by life circumstances and poverty into lives that give the thoughtful reader pause. According to the author, a new, more rigid, and less fluid socioeconomic class system is emerging that makes the old and more tradition notions of rugged individualism look like a overly generous social welfare state. And we all know it was hardly that.

Finnegan spent a great deal of time with families in a number of different communities across the country, and became an intimate observer to the kinds of futile and often desperate attempts to become participating card-carrying members of the increasingly elusive American Dream. His is a terrific and absorbing look at the issues of race, ethnicity, social class, and social change as it is rapidly evolving in contemporary American culture, and the author never loses sight of the basic humanity of each of his subjects or their struggles to gain the material success and security so often portrayed in the electronic media they watch incessantly. Those he writes about are always dealt with in compassionate terms, recognizing individual complexities and talents that belie their poor educational experiences and lack of opportunities. We recognize the subjects as intelligent and multi-faceted people, and empathize with their frustrating existential situations.

This is a book one finds fascinating to read, in spite of its gloomy assessment of the reality of life in the "not-so-toni" barrios and exurbs surrounding the cities. It is an extremely entertaining and edifying book, a poignant and intelligent excursion into the heart of America's expanding impoverished underclass, and a well-focused peer into the unpromising future for millions of youngsters and twenty-something adults just now entering the job market with so few skills and very little hope of climbing out of their own desperate life circumstances. The book is a must-read for anyone thinking that Michael Harrington's "Other America" has melted away in under the prevailing influence of the financially sunny 1990s, and I recommend it as a book representing a more comprehensive national perspective regarding the need for government action to provide more opportunities and a variety of appropriate training programs for such disenfranchised Americans. As John Kennedy once said, if we cannot reach out to help the most humble and wretched among us, then there is little hope to save the fortunate few.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Living Under the Glacier, April 21, 2001

By 

sweetmolly (RICHMOND, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country (Modern Library Paperbacks) (Paperback)

William Finnegan has a spare elegant prose style, highly readable, that sweeps us through an uncomfortable present day odyssey of the underclass of the United States. The book is impressively noted and indexed, but with distressingly small print.

Mr. Finnegan has an uncanny ability to arrive in a completely strange town and somehow immediately bond with perfect strangers who confide in him, ask him to dinner, and if necessary let him bunk down and move in. This "intimacy" gene resides in the authors of "Cold Blood" and "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." If you and I were in that strange town, we would be lucky to get directions to the nearest gas station, let alone an invitation for dinner.

If you automatically assume this underclass exists only in the inner-city ghettos, your comfort level is going to go way down. The subjects ranged from New Haven, CT, east Texas, central Washington state, and a suburb of Los Angeles. All of the youngsters had bleak, dangerous, unfocused lives. Their intelligence ranged from average to highly superior, their connection to their schools was tenuous or non-existent, their ambitions and dreams were either unrealistic or pitifully cynical. They seem to know far better than their parents that the road to the middle class is not a broad, welcoming boulevard, but an almost unreachable goal.

Supportive, loving, responsible families do not appear to be the panacea we are all led to believe. Juan admires, approves and loves his parents; he just believes their lives have nothing to do with his. Sadly, he is right. Mindy has a strong, loving mother who cannot fathom the world Mindy is almost forced to live in. The lack of impact of a strong family shocked me.

The author pulls no punches and in his summary states, "What price are Americans willing to pay for social peace? This seems to me a central question. We jail the poor in their multitudes, abandon the dream of equality, cede more and more of public life to private interests, let lobbyists run government. Those who can afford to do so lock themselves inside gated communities and send their children to private schools. And then we wonder why the world at large has become harsher and more cynical, why our kids have become strange to us. What young people show us is simply the world we have made for them."

This is a worthwhile, hard-hitting book. It will stay with you. You won't easily forget Terry, Lanee, Juan and Mindy.