The Other Side of Prospect

A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City

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Pub Date 18 Oct 2022 | Archive Date 07 Oct 2022

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Description

A landmark work of intimate reporting on race, class, and violence, told through a murder and the intersecting lives of three men in an iconic neighborhood.

One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in an innocent sixteen-year-old boy being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native and acclaimed author Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and how it reveals enduring national problems. Like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc in her classic, Random Family, he has produced an immersive portrait of a community beset by inequality and gun violence. Dawidoff describes how Black families left the Jim Crow South for a neighborhood that offered uplift and mobility—and the subsequent heavy toll exacted by racism and deindustrialization.

He chronicles a sensitive child’s coming of age amid police coercion and adult prison. He tells the dramatic story of how a true-believing lawyer helped to win the man’s release—and the heartbreaking challenges he and other formerly incarcerated people face on reentry into society.

About the Author: Nicholas Dawidoff is the best-selling author of five books, including The Catcher Was a Spy and In the Country of Country. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, he has been a Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, and Art for Justice Fellow.

A landmark work of intimate reporting on race, class, and violence, told through a murder and the intersecting lives of three men in an iconic neighborhood.

One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a...


A Note From the Publisher

Subject Category: Social Science

Subject Category: Social Science


Advance Praise

"The Other Side of Prospect isn’t just a necessary American book, it’s an essential American book. By unraveling the long, profound story across generations that leads to one teenager twice confessing to a crime that he didn’t commit, Nicholas Dawidoff reveals just how pervasive the failures of our time can be. A child of intelligence and personal promise becomes a killer; an elderly grandfather is murdered; and an innocent boy suffers under the brutal weight of a nearly a decade in prison with memories no exoneration can erase. This is beyond the best book about the crisis of incarceration in America. It is also a book that reminds us indelibly that the Great Migration has tragically ended for many in not just the closing of factories and opportunities, but also the filling of graves and prison cells." - Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon

"This intricate book continues to grow like a tree in me—Bobby’s tender, persistent yearnings bound by the generations of contaminated soil and stunted growth that fear creates. Nicholas Dawidoff’s huge accomplishment is that he does the meticulous forensics of the crime of our fearing those in peril, and The Other Side of Prospect portrays what we continue to lose—all the knowledge lost, all the joy that’s stilled—when fear predominates. I finished reading his book with heartbreak and great gratitude. Its quest for broader justice lingers on." - Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family

"The Other Side of Prospect isn’t just a necessary American book, it’s an essential American book. By unraveling the long, profound story across generations that leads to one teenager twice...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781324002024
PRICE $32.50 (USD)

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