The Other Side of Prospect

A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City

De: Nicholas Dawidoff

Narrado por: Diontae Black

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 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 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.

©2022 Nicholas Dawidoff (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Incredibly good

Excellent writing. Executional story. Inspiring, informative, and cautionary. There are several more Bobbys with very different outcomes. the book explores that reality brilliantly.

Stunning story:a must read

This is a true story of urban injustice, fully investigated by the author, brilliantly written, and sadly authentic.

Brilliant storytelling and narration

The always-insightful Dawidoff’s best book to date- weaves together now-too-familiar aspects of structural racism and inequality into a fresh and compelling story that is both intensely personal and tragically American.

Good book, dreadful reading

Terrible narration. Many words are misspoken (e.g. "consolation" for "consultation"; "baklava" for "balaclava." Many names of people and places are mispronounced, including "Newhallville," which appears throughout the story. Many sentences are misread, with the wrong words linked or stressed. The audio does not do justice to the written book.

Great information bad narrator.

What happened to this man was terrible.

The narrator kind of ruined it for me. Look forward to the mispronunciation of such common words as appellate. Also there's plenty of mispronouncing well known names like Ruger, Greenwich and Dartmouth.

A well written and researched piece of work, just not read properly.