Kristof and WuDunn to Discuss "Tightrope" at the Scarsdale Adult School

Star Scarsdale journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have turned their focus from the international to the domestic in their new book, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, co-written by this husband-and-wife team.

Kristof and WuDunn will discuss their work in a discussion sponsored by the Scarsdale Adult School and moderated by Scarsdale’s Chirs Riback on Thursday July 23 at 7:30 pm via Zoom. Register today by clicking this link. at www.scarsdaleadultschool.org.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of the acclaimed, best-selling Half the Sky now issue a plea — deeply personal and told through the lives of real Americans — to address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an “other America.”

The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof’s old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. And while these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, ranging from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia.
But here too are stories about resurgence, among them: Annette Dove, who has devoted her life to helping the teenagers of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as they navigate the chaotic reality of growing up poor; Daniel McDowell, of Baltimore, whose tale of opioid addiction and recovery suggests that there are viable ways to solve our nation’s drug epidemic. Taken together, these accounts provide a picture of working-class families needlessly but profoundly damaged as a result of decades of policy mistakes. With their superb, nuanced reportage, Kristof and WuDunn have given us a book that is both riveting and impossible to ignore.

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