William Finnegan is the author of Cold New World, A Complicated War, Dateline Soweto, Crossing the Line, and Barbarian Days. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987, he lives in Manhattan.
“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
“Finnegan’s book, a status report on the American Dream, gets its
power the way a good novel does: from sheer story—the
unpredictable, rich specifics of people’s lives. Alas, every
syllable of the book rings true.”—Time
“[Finnegan’s] stories do not concern a trial of the century, a
perfect storm or the ascent of a tall mountain. Instead, they are
about powerless people left battered and grounded by an economy
that may be richly rewarding the educated, but is cruelly punishing
many others. . . . The cumulative effect is to create an unusual
kind of sympathy for the characters he describes. It’s not the
stereotypical liberal sense of pity. Rather, Finnegan convincingly
connects the wayward events in these people’s lives to the messages
and forces they detect around them.”—The New York Times Book
Review
“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
“Cold New World is a sustained and unflinching look into the lives
of young Americans who live in poverty of varying kinds: economic,
social, intellectual, spiritual. . . . Part of the appeal of this
gathering of life-portraits and firsthand revelations is that
Finnegan can so adroitly place himself in the center of Cold New
World as its brooding conscience-stricken, and culturally
privileged witness even as he allows his subjects the full range of
their mercurial humanity. Despite its pessimism, Cold New World is
brimming with a quickened, heated life and surprises of the sort
adolescents invariably provide their astonished elders.”—Joyce
Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books
“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
“Finnegan is our Alexis de Tocqueville, teaching us locals
something new about ourselves and our community by telling us the
enduring human stories that defy stereotypes.”—New Haven
Advocate
“This book should be read by every parent. It should be read by
every voter. It should be read and memorized by every policy-,aler/
Read it now, or live it later.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“A beautifully written but sobering book . . . bringing a
historical and generational weight of detail to [its] chapters that
reminds one of J. Anthony Lukas’ best journalism.”—San Francisco
Chronicle Book Review
“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
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