Cold New World: Growing Up in Harder Country

by William Finnegan

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of  Barbarian Days,  this narrative nonfiction classic documents the rising inequality and cultural alienation that presaged the crises of today.
 
“A status report on the American Dream [that] gets its power [from] the unpredictable, rich specifics of people’s lives.”— Time
 
“[William] 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
 
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. William Finnegan spent years embedded with families in four communities across the country to become an intimate observer of the lives he reveals in Cold New World . What emerges from these beautifully rendered portraits is a prescient and compassionate book that never loses sight of its subjects’ humanity.
 
A  NEW YORK TIMES  NOTABLE BOOK • A  LOS ANGELES TIMES  BEST NONFICTION SELECTION

Praise for  Cold New World
 
“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
 
“The most remarkable of William Finnegan’s 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.” — The Village Voice

“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

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Politics, Journalism, Essays, Economics, Cultural Studies

448 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 1998

About the author

William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has won several awards for his journalism and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his work "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life."

Reviews

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cold New World is a well written, meticulously prepared and documented, and strongly reasoned work that offers today's readers important insights into the social, economic, and political factors that have served to push the current and previous generation of youth along a downward trajectory. As a community college professor, I was interested in reading about the challenges such students face and was left with the sad realization that things have only gotten worse during the past twenty or so years for an entire swath of the young generation (those lacking sufficient parental, community, economic, and social support systems). Although the stories told in this book were written a generation ago, they are no less relevant today than at the time they were written. I was quite impressed with the grasp this writer had of the social sciences, economics in particular, despite having an academic background in literature. Such is the value of a college education received back in the golden days!

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. A sensitive, patient, observant book about the effect of urban poverty on US families in the 1990s, seen through four families in four cities. Exhaustively reported, carefully written, and beautifully argued. Finnegan knows how much of himself and his own biases to allow into the work--enough to buck false objectivity, but not so much as to prevent the people who's writing about from speaking for themselves. Ultimately it's an indictment of Finnegan's own generation, who as he says (quoting someone else) first turned on their parents, then turned on their own children by cutting taxes, education, welfare, and social programmes, at the same time as their wealth was shrinking the middle class and making the plight of the impoverished that much more miserable. Yet in spite of these positions, the book isn't a polemic: it's portraits of real people and their struggles-- some grim, some utterly miserable, some faintly hopeful--against that backdrop. A necessary read.

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

COLD NEW WORLD is a collection of sociological writing by a journalist who visited a range of struggling American communities, and focused primarily on its young people. I could easily see this book being used in a college classroom, as even though the pop culture references are quite dated, the strife experienced by the young people has if anything only grown in our current era. After all, this book was written before the multiple economic and housing crises that occurred in the new millennium.

It seems that contemporary America is indeed, quite cold, especially toward its young people. The job market continues to shrink and safety nets have been reigned in. It is no wonder that the immediate thrills and money of gang life and crime appeal to teens. It honestly seems as if we have returned to the America of the 1930s, with widespread homelessness and desperation.

[Matthew J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Depressingly awesome in it’s capturing of the mid-90’s poverty world spread across America. And, frightening in the fact that other than some pop-culture references, you could have told me it was written in 2024 and I’d have believed you. Finnegan is a masterclass writer, and clearly is far more than the “guy who wrote barbarian days”

[Andrew Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Puts my own life in perspective

I came to this book after reading Finnegan's brilliant surf literature and was very much impressed with his stories after embedding himself with these teens. It really made me think about not only the future of my kids but also just how lucky I was to have parents that were around so I didn't turn out like the Antelope Valley kids. I was raised in a town that had similar demographics where a teen could easily get going down the same bad road

Since Finnegan wrote this in the 90s these teens are the same age as me. I'd love to know what became of them by now

[Ann Frost · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book by Bill Finnegan (Barbarian Days) that I really enjoyed. Yet very depressing. Written about kids in four depressed, downwardly mobile communities in the US. Through the lens of the lives of these teens, in four different regions of the country, Finnegan documents the brutal, bleak, and depressing futures many in the US live with. Not an uplifting book, but an important read nonetheless.

[Matt Medelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well researched and well written depiction of the alienation, desperation, and hopelessness felt by young people in various American communities in the 1990s.. Sadly, the underlying causes that Finnegan has identified- income inequality, school disinvestment, weakening unions, worsening job prospects, a shrinking middle class, racial tensions, and downward economic mobility have certainly only worsened since then.

[Kubah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pětadvacet let stará knížka o amerických komunitách na okraji - dezorientovaní teenageři, spirála chudoby, drogy, násilí, rasismus, úpadek celých měst. Černošská ghetta v Connecticutu, hispánské gangy ve státě Washington, neonacisti na kraji Los Angeles. Finneganovy velmi čtivé reportáže z útrob Ameriky, které jsou pořád stejně aktuální.

[Graham McKay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Refreshing to read a journalist who really listens and doesn’t have an agenda evident in every chapter. Finnegan gets inside the minds, lives, and neighborhoods of various teenagers growing up in downward communities. The result is a slow burn that offers really keen perspective, and makes you consider the roots of/solutions to the cyclical problems these kids face.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars for the section on my hometown, San Augustine, Texas, alone. Well done.

[Marc Cazarez]

amazing

[JTGlow · Rating 5 out of 5]

A colleague picked this as summer reading for Journalism. I was worried it would be so out of date, but sadly, some statistics might need updating, but the issues presented are still relevant today. I wish there were an updated edition of this.
I would definitely read more of William Finnegan's work. Well researched and compelling.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very insightful book. William Finnegan is a journalist with the New Yorker and a very good writer.

In this book, he studies the lives of four working class families, and their communities, across the country. Despite differences in region, ethnicity and culture, they are all on the other side of post-WWII prosperity and sliding down, down down. FTW is everywhere.

How did it happen? The people of a certain era were provided great and free public schools, but rejected the same for their kids. Unions used to be great, but now just increase costs of consumer goods and cut into corporate profits. After these things have served their purpose, they're too expensive to maintain for future generations.

And this book was 19 years before President Trump, who is both reflective of this decline and will no doubt accelerate it.

I can't really describe it as a pleasant read, but it certainly helped me to understand things better.

[Kati Stevens]

on page xvii

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great portrait of poverty in New Haven, CT.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely informational and interesting.

[Diana]

I've read books 1 and 4.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

depressing

[Daniel Lovins · Rating 2 out of 5]

First chapter follows a New Haven family during the hight of the crack epidemic, with interesting insights into inner city social conditions, welfare, criminal justice, poverty, etc.

[Lauren Farmer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would have rated this book higher if I had not read the epilogue. Interesting stories, I just disagree with some of the author's analyses of how to fix the problems these young people face.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reading this with my students. I've assigned it to my "Adolescence" course.