The Other Side of Prospect

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One of ‘s Most Anticipated Books of 2022 A landmark work of intimate reporting on inequality, race, class, and violence, told through a murder and intersecting lives in an iconic American neighborhood. A searing portrait of injustice in America. 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. illuminates complex social issues—the Great Migration, mass incarceration, wrongful conviction, prisoner reentry—in deeply personal terms. This is a haunting, devastating, magnificent work of narrative nonfiction. This intricate book continues to grow like a tree in me—Bobby’s tender, persistent yearnings bound by the generations of contaminated soil 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 portrays the ongoing consequences of what we all 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 pushes forward. is an intimate and haunting recovery of lives both lost and found, potential both squandered and realized, and struggles both failed and furthered. It forces us to face the brutal injustice and inequality that defines our nation’s justice system as well as one of its richest and most prestigious cities, and to take a hard look at the deeper roots and wider resonances of that ugliness. The true gift of Nicholas Dawidoff’s powerful recovery of this wrongful conviction and the fight to have it overturned, however, is its ability to help us to see what is still irrevocably beautiful about this country, and thus what still may be possible for its future. is a riveting narrative that shows and tells the story of a deeply distressed Black ghetto neighborhood severely challenged by the ills of deindustrialization, racialized poverty, and random street crime and violence—a must-read for anyone wishing to understand. US

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