Cold new world - William Finnegan

'William Finegan's Cold New World is a book about an important, grievously underreported (until now) social phenomenon, the shutting out of a whole generation of young Americans from opportunity. What is most impressive about it, though, is that Finnegan has performed the fundamental writer's miracle of making his subjects come alive. The standard to which this kind of book is usually held is James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but the truth is, Cold New World is better: more researched, more vivid, more empathetic. You can't read it and fail to be persuaded that the prosperousness and optimism of this moment in national life, which can seem pervasive, actually haven't penetrated past the top layers of society' Nicholas Lemann

'As journalist Bill Finnegan has the moral equivalent of the perfect pitch. He has staked out as his beat the disenfranchised - the sort of people most educated, privileged white people have had no contact with and could care less about. Having charted some the starkest territory on the planet - civil-war-torn Mozambique, the South African homelands - Finnegan now directs his cold, compassionate eye at several equally grim back eddies of the American dream. Only an extraordinary talented and gusty journalist could have penetrated them and brought them to such compelling life' Alex Shoumatoff

'For years, Bill Finnegan, a masterful reporter, has immersed himself in the world of the young and the lost. The reports he bring from four corners of the country, four desperate corners, will tell you more about the drug problem and more about what ails America than any other book I know of. Cold New World is chilling and dark, but it also vibrates with life' David Remnick

'Cold New World opens doors that most writers would be reluctant even to approach. Mr Finnegan looks in with the keen powers of observation and sympathy that mark all of his work. In an era of hand-wringing over the nation's youth, he refuses to dwell in generalities. He describes and explains many of the real problems in the most powerful and affecting of ways - by bringing real people into life on the page' Tracy Kidder