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...Unknown City: The Lives of Poor and Working Class Young Adults explores the twentysomethings who occupy the lowest economic stratum. The book does not pose a singular argument or present one over-arching thesis. Rather, by chronicling the lives of the young working class, it attempts to locate patterns and questions. But the questions that The Unknown City poses extend to more awesome issues than the future of economics and jobs. Instead, it documents the strain of poverty and race relations as inner cities turn from melting pots into pressure cookers, ready to explode...
These first hand interviews give The Unknown City an edge that you do not often see in sociological texts. Gen Xers who talk about the urban decay that trails de-industrialization let readers into the most intimate crevices of their lives, with a despair that lingers long after you have put down the book. There is the girl who sleeps in her clothes in case she hears her father beating her siblings and has to run to get help in the middle of the night. We read about the teenage drug dealer who tells us how he was confronted with...
...about the lamentations of the middle class segment of Generation X. The struggles of these interviewees go deeper than political or cultural disaffection. Their struggle is one to survive. Fine and Weis document it with language that is less dense than the typical sociological study. As a result, The Unknown City is easy to interpret. But not easy to read. There is a flavor of dejection and hopelessness that leaves a bitter aftertaste, rendering some of the stories painful to get through. While the heavy reliance on interviews give The Unknown City a realistic outlook, it presents astonishing racial...
...Unknown City is a cogent and at times, exhausting read. The impact of the book lies in the unmerciless truth of its subject matter. This is not a movie or TV miniseries of the week. In The Unknown City the screenplay is that of life; the script that of experience. The interviewees are not fictional characters, but real people divulging the most intimate and, oftimes, humiliating details of their lives. And this is why, unless you are using it for a research paper, The Unknown City can be hard to get through. Perhaps it is a function of a culture...
...first time around, Mitchard was a virtual unknown: a Madison, Wis., newspaper columnist and a widowed mother of five. Then she got what has come to be known, for a select group including Toni Morrison, Alice Hoffman and, most recently, Edwidge Danticat, as "the call." Says Mitchard, laughing: "It fell under the category of 'Who knew?' I was dumbfounded, honest to gosh." On her follow-up book, the hard part was to exorcise all notions of trying to duplicate the previous success. "The temptation is to just write something like, 'He had a hairy chest, she had big breasts...