Publishers Weekly
11/06/2023
Education journalist Herold reveals in his eye-opening debut how suburban public schools are failing an increasingly poor student population, and argues that the suburban American Dream is now an entrapping myth. In the early postwar decades, Herold explains, white families and their children thrived in the suburbs, thanks to supportive government policies. When these suburbs ceased growing, however, residents aged, tax bases shrank, and school funding declined. As poorer families and families of color took up residence, they encountered deteriorating schools and rising taxes. Drawing on three years spent following five families as the parents worked to assure quality education for their children, Herold highlights how interactions with teachers, school administrators, and school boards were integral to the parents’ hands-on approach. His subjects include well-off families, such as the Beckers in Lucas, Tex., who were able to abandon the local schools when they failed to meet expectations, as well as low-income families like the Hernandezes in Compton, Calif., who struggled to advance their children through an inadequate school system. Herold’s portrayals are fine-grained and attentive to the conflicts that pervade interactions between parents and educators, though some readers may be skeptical that, in Herold’s telling, the parents are always right, while teachers and school administrators fall short. Still, this is an illuminating account of a poorly understood crisis currently facing America’s public schools. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
An important, cleareyed account of suburban boom and bust, and the challenges facing the country today. . . . each suburb’s history is engrossing, and Herold, a journalist who has frequently reported on public education, delivers an up-close, intimate account of life there that resounds with broader meaning. The families also reflect the expanding range of people who now call American suburbs home.” —The New York Times Book Review
“This intrepid inquiry into the unfulfilled promise of America’s suburbs posits that a ‘deep-seated history of white control, racial exclusion, and systematic forgetting’ has poisoned the great postwar residential experiment. . . . Herold, a white journalist raised in Penn Hills, a Pittsburgh suburb, peels back layers of structural racism, granting that ‘the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier were linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who lived there now.’” —The New Yorker
“Powerful . . . In a timely narrative, Herold draws attention to a morally urgent problem while offering a possible route toward revival.” —The Washington Post, Best New Books for January
“A blistering indictment of how American suburbs were built on racism and unsustainable development that ‘functioned like a Ponzi scheme’ . . . [Herold’s] portraits of families are nuanced and moving . . . The patterns are clear and continuing.” —The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Through beautifully layered reporting, Herold argues that time and demographic change have created a novel disenchantment. The suburbs are now a trap.” —New Republic
“Thoughtful, informative, and very disturbing . . . deserves a wide audience.” —Booklist
“Disillusioned breaks open the quiet racial injustice eating away at the heart of American suburbs. Shattering the myth of upward class mobility through meritocracy, Disillusioned shows us how white supremacy disenfranchises POCs even as they fulfill the requirements of the American suburban middle class dream—and how even white people, the intended beneficiaries of that dream, are starting to wonder if it’s a dream they can still afford to believe in. But whether the suburbs are integrated or predominantly white, people of color still face the legacy of segregationist violence as they seek to provide their children with the suburban educations that a middle class income has for so long promised Americans. A necessary read for everyone in an American suburb today.” —Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times-bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop
“Not only is Disillusioned engaging—riveting, really—it strikes at the very heart of the geography and emotional economy of race in the United States. ‘The suburbs’ are such a potent symbol and reality of the nation, and race is at the very center of their meaning, creation, and transformation. For decades now, we have lived with the myth that the suburbs are the centerpiece of the American Dream and that school integration is a simple matter of putting different races of children in the same well-maintained building in a bucolic setting. Disillusioned challenges us to be far more rigorous and honest in our accounts of race, place and community. An essential text in a challenging time.” —Imani Perry, New York Times-bestselling author of South to America, winner of the National Book Award
“With Disillusioned, Benjamin Herold delivers a powerful account of the intersection of race, housing, education, and injustice in America. Through the moving stories of five American families, Herold illuminates how segregation, white flight, and chronic underinvestment conspire to deny a new, diverse generation of suburbanites the brass rings of financial prosperity and emotional security. What’s more, he weaves in his family’s suburban journey and his personal reckoning with the impact of race and class in his own life and his perceptions of the lives of others to craft an invaluable, irreplaceable report. Honest, nuanced, and searing, Disillusioned is a book educators, parents, school board members, researchers, and anyone concerned with racial equity in America's schools should read.” —John B. King, Jr., former U.S. Secretary of Education and Chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY)
“Equal parts compelling, revealing, disquieting, and necessary, Disillusioned challenges us to update our mythologies about suburbs as enchanted utopias with magical schools eagerly waiting to ably educate all who walk through their doors. Benjamin Herold reminds us that place and community mean, do, and become different things when refracted through the prisms of wealth, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racism. Necessary reading for all who want to understand the past and present as a starting point for forward progress, the insights, stories, and people in this book will stay with you long after you have turned the last page.” —Noliwe Rooks, chair of Africana Studies at Brown University and author of Cutting School
“A well-informed, ambitious narrative about the simmering inequities in American suburbs . . . Herold adeptly manages the sprawling storytelling . . . with empathy, varied scenes, and well-rounded characterizations. A deeply valuable study of the decline of suburbia.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Eye-opening . . . Herold’s portrayals are fine-grained and attentive to the conflicts that pervade interactions between parents and educators . . . An illuminating account of a poorly understood crisis currently facing America’s public schools.” —Publishers Weekly
“In Disillusioned, Ben Herold meticulously rips open myths that lie at the heart of the American dream—that geography is destiny, and that the forces driving inequity in society can be escaped rather that engaged. In this brilliant, compelling, and highly moving work, Herold shows us how the paths to suburbia are too often paved in fool's gold, in as much as the drivers of unequal educational outcomes there also impact schools and economies here. Herold’s page-turning narrative empathically reveals the lengths to which parents go to assure better futures for their children—while at the same time exposing the precarity of the larger American educational system. And he teaches us, yet again, that the promise of America must be addressed everywhere for it to be realized anywhere. This book is required reading for anyone who cares about our children and their collective futures.” —Jonathan Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness
“Every once in a while, a book reorients your perspective and sense of place and privilege. Disillusioned did that for me.” —Salamishah Tillet, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of In Search of the Color Purple
“There have been many memorable books about America's cities. Yet this nation's suburbs have alternately been ignored or reduced to a cartoonish stereotype—lawnmowers, strip malls, social conformity—even by serious artists and intellectuals. So Ben Herold's Disillusioned arrives as a blast of incisive analysis and narrative force. His five families occupy the very real world where the exposed wires of race, class, development, and deterioration cross and set off crackling sparks. This is the definitive account of the promises and betrayals of the suburban dream.” —Samuel G. Freedman, Columbia University professor of journalism and author of Small Victories
"It is such an odd thing, really, to be somewhere—and this 'somewhere' is the suburb both Ben and I lived in—without sidewalks. It felt alien when I was a 16 year old whose parents just moved out there from the city, in search of a better and safer future for their son. And it still feels, for lack of a better term, thoroughly f**ked up now. What Ben does, so passionately, so rigorously, and so personally, in Disillusioned, is make plain why. Like why would an entire municipality be engineered to be unwalkable? And after he asks, and answers, so many of the terrible and meticulous and intentional whys, he asks and answers 'Who?'
“I'm not telling you to immediately read this book. Instead, if you happen to be in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and you find yourself in Penn Hills, I want you to try to cross a street." —Damon Young, author of What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker and host of the "Stuck with Damon Young" podcast
“Benjamin Herold makes clear that our racially exclusionary past continues to contaminate the present and will do so until we can confront it with honesty. His sobering analysis of the disinvestment which follows the diversifying of American suburbs, enlivened by the compelling narratives of families in search of an elusive American dream, is a good place to start.” —Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-11-14
A well-informed, ambitious narrative about the simmering inequities in American suburbs.
Though Herold grew up in “a middle-class white family that passively accepted suburbia’s bounty,” he convincingly argues that numerous factors, including “sweeping demographic changes, rising housing costs, and the vanishing heart of America’s middle class,” alongside the troubling history of segregation enforced by structural racism, have created a systemic crisis: “Suburbia is now home to a collision of competing dreams, each of which seems to be crumbling.” In his energetic debut, Herold chronicles how he “traveled the country, immersing [himself] in the lives of families on the front lines of suburban change,” tracking several families’ arcs amid the mostly declining fortunes of representational suburbs, including communities outside Atlanta and Dallas, progressive Evanston, Illinois, and the notoriously troubled city of Compton, California, arguing that these locales each demonstrate a “larger pattern of racialized development and decline.” Indeed, he discovers a disturbingly pervasive entropy in areas across the U.S., including Penn Hills, located outside an increasingly gentrifying Pittsburgh. Contrastingly, the author portrays the “anxiety about the erosion of long-standing privileges” of a conservative white family who moved to a new Texas exurb where they encountered similar strife concerning finances, infrastructure, and education budgets. Herold ably navigates these issues, particularly the divisive role played by school board politics (“public education in America had become a hot-button issue”) and sets the dreams of these diverse families against regional history. The author was still conducting interviews during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which further fractured each community’s social cohesion. As he writes, “conflicts over masks, vaccines, and racial equality were all raging anew.” Herold adeptly manages the sprawling storytelling and subtopics (albeit frequently focused on bureaucratic minutiae) with empathy, varied scenes, and well-rounded characterizations.
A deeply valuable study of the decline of suburbia.