Fucked at Birth: Recalibrating the American Dream for the 2020s

by Dale Maharidge

Overview

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge has dedicated his career to documenting poverty in America. Now, driving across the country in an unprecedented time of upheaval, he embarks on a fearless reckoning with our future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951213220
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	660,617
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

For two decades, Dale Maharidge has been one of America's leading chroniclers of poverty. Alongside photographer Michael Williamson, his book And Their Children After Them won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1990, revisiting the places and people of depression-era America, depicted in Walker Evans's and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Also with Williamson, Maharidge wrote Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, which Bruce Springsteen has credited as an influence for songs such as "Youngstown" and "The New Timer".

Table of Contents

I Fucked at Birth

Fucked at Birth 13

Loaves & Fishes 21

II California

The Snake Pit 29

The Island 43

Griffith Park 49

The Shower of Hope 57

III Nevada-Colorado

Feeding America 69

Paranoia in Flagstaff 73

Colorado Plateau 79

IV Denver

Struggle of Love 89

BLM 97

V Meat Towns

Crete 111

It's a Wonderful Life 119

VI Youngstown

I'm Sinking Down 133

VII If 20's are 30's

If 20's are 30's 153

VIII New York City

Recalibrating 167

Acknowledgments 181

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"In urgent, devastating prose, Dale Maharidge chronicles his road trip across a nation in freefall, meeting left-behind Americans who are surviving not only the pandemic but other deadly contagions he's diagnosed in decades of reporting: income inequality, institutional racism, creeping fascism, hard-heartedness and fear. For all who seek the cure, Fucked at Birth is essential reading.” —Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

Editorial Reviews

"This is a book ripped from the headlines, from Black Lives Matter to recently thriving downtowns stripped of office workers and service workers. Those catching the brunt of it all, those with the steepest hills to climb, may have been fucked at birth. But for everyone, as Maharidge observes, the feeling of safety is folly. A sharp wake-up call to heed the new Depression and to recognize the humanity of those hit hardest." —Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW

From the Publisher

★ 2020-10-07
An open-hearted American travelogue through the new underclass.

The raw title comes from a piece of graffiti Maharidge saw at a boarded-up gas station in the California desert. He then drove across the country to see if people could relate to the sentiment. Sadly yet unsurprisingly, many could. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author is here to sound a warning: The pandemic is leaving a trail of widespread poverty, homelessness, opioid abuse, and other maladies in its wake. Along his journey, the author visited good Samaritans running food banks and homeless encampments. He talked to professors and scavengers. Some of the new underclass still have their fancy cars; more don’t have any car at all. Maharidge bears witness, but he does more than that. He brings to bear his experience as a former newspaper reporter covering the down-and-out. More important still, he meets everyone where they live. Indeed, the book is a barely restrained demand for readers to pay attention to the have-nots lest you wake up tomorrow and find yourself among them. “We with white-collar employment make the assumption that a majority of Americans are exactly like us because most of us never interact with the working class,” writes the author. A student of the Great Depression, Maharidge understands the similarities with current times, but he also sees the differences: During the Depression, the homeless at least had the admittedly squalid Hooverville camps. Today, state and city laws are designed to make them get up and go…where? This is a book ripped from the headlines, from Black Lives Matter to recently thriving downtowns stripped of office workers and service workers. Those catching the brunt of it all, those with the steepest hills to climb, may have been fucked at birth. But for everyone, as Maharidge observes, the feeling of safety is folly.

A sharp wake-up call to heed the new Depression and to recognize the humanity of those hit hardest.

Kirkus Reviews