The Berkeley Archipelago

by Joseph P. Lyford

In the Airtight Cage, Joseph Lyford presented a fine-grained portrait of the black and Puerto Rican underclass subsisting on 125 deteriorating blocks of Manhattan's West Side. Fifteen years later he brought that same approach to Berkeley, California where he found a once cohesive community that had degenerated into a civic archipelago inhabited by citizens who 'make alliances not on the basis of common purpose but of common enemies.'

Paperback

Published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Ari · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful, and wonderfully subversive, portrait of Berkeley in the 1960s and 1970s. The Cal library has it -- and it's worth reading if you're at all curious about the city, and how it got the way it did.

[Pamela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Earlier half of the book was pretty interesting.. and I enjoyed the chapter on policing in Berkeley..