Finnegan - Cold new world: growing up in a harder country

Acclaim for Cold New World

[Finnegans] 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. Its not the stereotypical liberal sense of pity. Rather, Finnegan convincingly connects the wayward events in these peoples lives to the messages and forces they detect around them.

The New York Times Book Review

William Finnegan takes us on a disturbing, riveting journey through otherwise neglected corners of America, from the hardscrabble streets of New Haven to the backcountry roads of East Texas. The stories he tellsso painstakingly and compassionately reportedare haunting. Theyll force you to look at our nation in a whole new light.

A LEX K OTLOWITZ

The most remarkable of William Finnegans 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. He respects his subjects too much to deny their responsibility, and himself too much to fall into cultural relativism.

The Village Voice

William Finnegans Cold New World is a book about an important, grievously underreported (until now) social phenomenon, the shutting out of a whole generation of young Americans from opportunity. What is most impressive about it, though, is that Finnegan has performed the fundamental writers miracle of making his subjects come alive. The standard to which this kind of book is usually held is James Agees Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but the truth is, Cold New World is better: more researched, more vivid, more empathetic.

N ICHOLAS L EMANN

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

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.

J OYCE C AROL O ATES , The New York Review of Books

This book will long be remembered as one of the few classics of American reporting. A vivid, scary, wise, and almost overwhelming account of the nation now emerging, it will leave you shaken. If you dont read it, youll be left out of some fundamental conversations.

B ILL M C K IBBEN

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

A beautifully written, poignant journey through Americas growing poverty class and the adolescents who wander without direction through this dreary landscape.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

As a journalist Bill Finnegan has the moral equivalent of perfect pitch. He has staked out as his beat the disenfranchisedthe sort of people most educated, privileged white people have had no contact with and could care less about. Having charted some of the starkest territory on the planetcivil-war-torn Mozambique, the South African homelandsFinnegan now directs his cold, compassionate eye at several equally grim back eddies of the American dream. Only an extraordinarily talented and gutsy journalist could have penetrated them and brought them to compelling life.

A LEX S HOUMATOFF

Cold New World opens doors that most writers would be reluctant even to approach. Mr. Finnegan looks in with the keen powers of observation and sympathy that mark all of his work. In an era of hand-wringing over the nations youth, he refuses to dwell in generalities. He describes and explains many of the real problems in the most powerful and affecting of waysby bringing real people to life on the page.

T RACY K IDDER

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-maker. Read it now, or live it later.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

[Finnegans] deft profiles can be both moving and downright frightening.

Business Week

Finnegans writing is flawless throughout Cold New World, skillfully paced and perceptively observed.

Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages

The level of grim insight throughout will disturb the optimism of a healthy economy supposedly reflected in Wall Streets rising numbers. This book is a vibrant eye-opener.

Publishers Weekly

Finnegan drives home, with power and vivid images, the birth of a troubling reality: a new American class structure. Cold New World is not a mournful song about the hopelessness of the inner city, but a meticulously reported story that crosses racial and cultural lines chilling, but rich in its sadness.

R ICK B RAGG , Elle

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

If this sounds like a depressing book, it is also a gripping, expertly written, and often quite funny one. The people Finnegan spends time with tend to face their situations with keen insight and dark humor, as well as frequent, if generally misplaced, bursts of optimism. Finnegan clearly likes them, and reserves his fury for those who would hold them responsible for their troubles, spouting phrases about a culture of poverty rather than facing the fact that the American government has betrayed the majority of its people and, especially, the young.

The Boston Globe

1999 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Copyright 1998 by William Finnegan

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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