Nicholas Dawidoff presents THE OTHER SIDE OF PROSPECT: A STORY OF VIOLENCE, INJUSTICE, AND THE AMERICAN CITY, with David Dodson
Monday, March 20, 2023 - Signing Line at 5:30 pm, Talk begins at 6:00 pm
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Flyleaf will offer seating for up to 60 in-person guests, with priority access given to folks who purchase the book. Masks recommended.
A landmark work of intimate reporting on inequality, race, class, and violence, told through a murder and intersecting lives in an iconic American 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 innocent sixteen-year-old Bobby 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 what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity.
In The Other Side of Prospect, he has produced an immersive portrait of a seminal community in an old American city now beset by division and gun violence. Tracing the histories of three people whose lives meet in tragedy—victim Pete Fields, likely murderer Major, and Bobby—Dawidoff indelibly describes optimistic families coming north from South Carolina as part of the Great Migration, for the promise of opportunity and upward mobility, and the harrowing costs of deindustrialization and neglect. Foremost are the unique challenges confronted by children like Major and Bobby coming of age in their “forgotten” neighborhood, steps from Yale University. After years in prison, with the help of a true-believing lawyer, Bobby is finally set free. His subsequent struggles with the memories of prison, and his heartbreaking efforts to reconnect with family and community, exemplify the challenges the formerly incarcerated face upon reentry into society and, writes Reginald Dwayne Betts, make this “the best book about the crisis of incarceration in America.”
Nicholas Dawidoff is the critically acclaimed author of five books, including The Catcher Was a Spy and In the Country of Country. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and has also been a Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, and Art for Justice Fellow.
David Dodson worked as the Executive Director of the Cummins Engine Foundation in Columbus, Indiana, and then for two decades, served as President of MDC, a Durham, North Carolina-based organization dedicated to equitable change in the South. He continues to serve as a Senior Fellow at MDC, where he is continuing his work, focusing on economic mobility and the causes of social disparities. David is a graduate of Yale University, where he received a B.A. in Architecture and Urban Policy and Master’s degrees in Divinity and in Public-Private Management.
