Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country

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.