After spending more than eight years with Dasani, Elliott has written a classic book that deserves a space on a bookshelf with Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. What ever happened to Dasani Coates? In her riveting 2013 series for the New York Times, Elliott introduced readers to the unforgettable, precocious, feisty 11-year-old girl living with her family in a Fort Greene, Brooklyn, homeless shelter. Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott (Random House) He fully grasps the DNA of New York, as it lurched forward over three incarnations, each one “bigger, faster, and sleeker than the one before, each one more merciless and beautiful.” Dyja tracks New York’s transformation from the hollowed-out, lawless city of the 1970s, where serial killer Son of Sam exclaimed, “Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C.,” into a gleaming metropolis of inequality that promotes a “new culture of wealth and celebrity valued explicitly because it was so visible.” Fans of Jane Jacobs’ classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities will applaud Dyja’s incisive, insightful book.ģ. New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation by Thomas Dyja (Simon & Schuster)ĭyja hoisted the chip off the City of Big Shoulders in his award-winning The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream, and now he takes a big, juicy bite out of the Big Apple. Magically, Boyle’s kaleidoscopic narrative focuses on that majority, destabilized by three impulses: the civil rights movement and white backlash, the Vietnam War and cultural liberalism, and the legalization of birth control, which ignited a battle between feminists and religious conservatives.Ģ. But his special talent is his keen radar for the rising middle class, framing his inquiry with a bungalow-living Chicago couple, buying a car and a television set and expecting their first child. Boyle, a Northwestern University history professor and winner of the National Book Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Prize for Arc of Justice about early 20th-century racial injustice in Detroit, fully synthesizes portraits of prominent figures into this nuanced narrative. Anthony Lukas’ classic Common Ground, which unravels history through those who lived it. Norton)īoyle’s gripping, indelible account of the ‘60s deserves a spot next to J. The Shattering: America in the 1960s by Kevin Boyle (W.
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