"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
"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
Random House, Incorporated Web Site, April, 2000
Summary
New Yorker writer William Finnegan spent time with families in four communities across America and became an
intimate observer of the lives he reveals in these beautifully rendered portraits: a fifteen-year-old drug dealer
in blighted New Haven, Connecticut; a sleepy Texas town transformed by crack; 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. Important, powerful, and compassionate, Cold New World gives us
an unforgettable look into a present that presages our future.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction of 1998 selection
One of the Voice Literary Supplement's Twenty-five Favorite Books of 1998
