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"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.
From Library Journal
On the evidence of this very American investigation, Finnegan has earned the deep respect accorded him for his earlier, risky reporting on African affairs. A New Yorker staff writer, he is best known for Crossing the Line (LJ 9/15/87), a work about apartheid in South Africa. For this new project, Finnegan dropped himself into the lives-particularly, the teenaged lives-of four communities missing out on the much-hyped market prosperity of the early Clinton years. Finnegan makes himself a benign feature in the blistered landscapes he draws, befriending the lead characters without corrupting the outcome of the stories in university-distant New Haven, CT; rural-remote San Augustine in East Texas; rural-suburban Sunnyside, in Washington State's wine country; and suburban-urban Antelope Valley, comprising the outer reaches of Los Angeles County. Finnegan produces page-turning social journalism, writing beautifully about the ugly lives of alienated teenagers and desperate parents sinking fast. Drugs, sex, and violence are the running themes. Only rarely does Finnegan insert personal or political commenatry into his extended vignettes, until the surprisingly charged epilog. Highly recommended for all academic and public libraries and especially high school collections.AScott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Jack Hitt
Finnegan's hanging-around technique yields riches among the kind of people that most reporters would strenuously avoid.
The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Osha Gray Davidson
The stories he tells are revealing and deeply affecting. In the hands of a lesser author, the accounts might have become repetitious, but with Finnegan's deft touch, each mournful tale deepens our understanding of the torments caused by what economists refer to, antiseptically, as "restructuring."
The Washington Post Book World, Matthew Rees
...Finnegan eschews dispassionate armchair analyses for up-close-and-personal accounts of the troubled teens and their families. His storytelling sometimes lapses into simple-minded sociology, but the final product is still a gripping narrative conveying intimate, eye-opening profiles of those Americans suffering from the effects of economic and social poverty.
From Booklist
In A Hope in the Unseen , Ron Suskind trailed Cedric Jennings from Washington, D.C.'s, toughest high school to Brown University. Anyone who doubts Cedric's success is the exception for poor, working class '90s teens should read Cold New World. In New Haven, Connecticut, San Augustine County, Texas, Washington's Yakima Valley, and the Antelope Valley in northern Los Angeles County, New Yorker writer Finnegan spent years with kids and their families. Race and drugs are motifs; so are "an increasingly inequitable educational system" (denying students technical competence and historical perspective), "official and political neglect of children, particularly poor children," and "the fecklessness and self-absorption of [Finnegan's] own generation." Without hope, Finnegan's subjects--African American in Texas and Connecticut, Mexican American in Washington, white in the Antelope Valley--fill "the ideological void left by consumerism [with] apathy, frustration, hedonism, nihilism, or an excess of the emotional detachment known as cool." And they adhere to the "fiercest, most vivid doctrines available, from militant turf defense . . . to full-blown race nationalism." Vivid, depressing, important reportage. Mary Carroll
From Kirkus Reviews
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 yetas he aptly showsspiritually 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. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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