Yale Library Book Talk: The Other Side of Prospect by Nicholas Dawidoff

203-432-1072
Time: 
Wednesday, February 1, 2023 - 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
Sterling Memorial Library, Lecture Hall
120 High Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Open to: 
Description: 

Nicholas Dawidoff, acclaimed author and New Haven native, will be in conversation with Michael Morand, Director of Community Engagement at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, about his new book The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City.

The Other Side of Prospect revisits the events of a New Haven summer evening in 2006, when 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. Dawidoff’s eight-year investigation of the story 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.

Nicholas Dawidoff is the critically acclaimed author of five books, including The Catcher Was a Spy and In the Country of a Country. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and has also been a Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, and Art for Justice Fellow.