Quiet Street
On American Privilege
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3.9 • 14 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A bold and deeply personal exploration of wealth, power, and the American elite, exposing how the ruling class—intentionally or not—perpetuates cycles of injustice
"[A] story about American inequity, and how it mindlessly, immorally, reproduces itself. Unlike most such stories, however, this one left me believing in the possibility...of drastic change." —Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom
Nick McDonell grew up on New York City’s Upper East Side, a neighborhood defined by its wealth and influence. As a child, McDonell enjoyed everything that rarefied world entailed—sailing lessons in the Hamptons, school galas at the Met, and holiday trips on private jets. But as an adult, he left it behind to become a foreign correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Quiet Street, McDonell returns to the sidewalks of his youth, exhuming with bracing honesty his upbringing and those of his affluent peers. From Galápagos Island cruises and Tanzanian safaris to steely handshakes and schoolyard microaggressions to fox-hunting rituals and the courtship rites of sexually precocious tweens, McDonell examines the rearing of the ruling class in scalpel-sharp detail, documenting how wealth and power are hoarded, encoded, and passed down from one generation to the next. What’s more, he demonstrates how outsiders—the poor, the nonwhite, the suburban—are kept out.
Searing and precise yet ultimately full of compassion, Quiet Street examines the problem of America’s one percent, whose vision of a more just world never materializes. Who are these people? How do they cling to power? What would it take for them to share it? Quiet Street looks for answers in a universal experience: coming to terms with the culture that made you.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and novelist McDonell (The Council of Animals) excavates his own privileged Manhattan upbringing in this slim but piercing study of classism in America. Though he fondly remembers his formative experiences at elite private schools in New York, and later at Harvard and Oxford universities, McDonell characterizes the culture of these institutions as a "superficial meritocracy" masking profound entitlement. He describes "The Bubble" that ensconced him and his prep school peers and the methods by which they reconciled the cognitive dissonance of their position at the top of the social hierarchy with their education's purported values of "kindness, fairness, generosity." These reflections support the author's assertion—underscored at the end of the book through conversations with former classmates—that it is not loss of wealth that America's elite fear most from reform, but rather a loss of self tied to that wealth. McDonell's prose is ingratiating, and his recollections carefully drawn, but sun-washed memories of summers spent on Amagansett make this occasionally feel like an apologia for the 1%. Still, it's an earnest and piercing examination of the mindset of the upper class.
