The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City

It's a too-familiar American story: a city—New Haven, Connecticut, in this case—divided by race, a young black man falsely imprisoned. To it, Dawidoff, who was raised in the city and who has written bestsellers on baseball, country music, and his own family, brings an understanding of the forces that have made this story familiar but, most valuably, eight years of patient reporting that make this story—of the murder of a 70-year-old black man, who came to this northern city in the Great Migration, and the coerced confession of a teenager who spent nine years in prison before being exonerated—personal and movingly particular. It's a tale of injustice far more than justice, and of a young man who finds himself in prison, and who has to find himself again outside of it. It's a book dense with the regrets and the small victories of lives forged in conditions of fleeting opportunity and daily violence.