Quiet Street
On American Privilege
(Sprache: Englisch)
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
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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.
Lese-Probe zu „Quiet Street “
The opulence of New York City is famous. Countless streaming programs, articles, novels, films, and social media feeds are dedicated to the markers of American oligarchy. Shows and films like Succession, The Devil Wears Prada, The Wolf of Wall Street; TikTok videos like what your rich mom coffee shop says about you: If you get your coffee at Via, you re a seventeen-year-old who is probably richer than me ; novels like The Bonfire of the Vanities and Breakfast at Tiffany s. Some examples of the genre, like The Great Gatsby, are staples of public education. The wealth is not a secret; neither is the inevitable violent decadence. I remember a schoolmate who bragged about defecating in bed so the maid would have to clean it up. Such behavior extended to the highest reaches of power, as was clear in President Trump s casual sexism and violence. One of his children and one of his grandchildren attended the same school as I and the aforementioned defecator.Still, I have affection for this school, which was called Buckley. It had a reputation for rigor, conservatism, old wealth, and athletic dominance over the dozen or so top tier private schools in the city. All sat in a highly developed hierarchy. Chapin girls marry doctors, Brearley girls become doctors, Spence girls have affairs with doctors, went one well-known saying about those particular girls schools. Still, all the schools had more in common than not, and if a child attended any one of them, he d be well prepared to achieve, maintain, and perhaps surpass his parents position in society. This preparation was accomplished as much by what was not taught as what was.
For example. At Buckley, we had Quiet Street. It began with a turn we d make on the charter buses not yellow school buses that we rode out to our playing fields most weekdays of the fall and spring. A right turn onto 124th Street in East Harlem. As we turned, one of the coaches sport-sirs, we called them would announce quiet
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street, and that bus, full of white adolescent boys, fell silent. No whacking of shoulder pads or lacrosse sticks, no trash talk, no jokes, no whispers, no pantomimes. Long before, some boy had called a racial epithet out the window, and a Black pedestrian, in response, had thrown something at the bus.
Or so I heard, long after I graduated. As a student, I never learned the details of the story. It was not widely or formally discussed. No one ever explained, and few asked. I knew only that to speak on Quiet Street was forbidden. In ten years at the school, on nearly a thousand bus trips, I remember none of my peers breaking the rule. Such was its mysterious power. What was going on? I recently asked some of my old classmates. All remembered Quiet Street, and some vague version of the origin story above. One said this:
Seems kind of silly, and also, I don t know, vaguely racist, maybe? You re basically like, If we re not quiet on this street then the horrible people who live here are going to jump us, you know what I mean? . . . Maybe not even vaguely racist. Maybe overtly?
My classmate understates the problem. Quiet Street was the manifestation of a culture that preferred silence to discussion of race and class. These issues could not be discussed without raising questions that might undermine, even reveal as hollow, the school s motto: Honor et Veritas, or Honor and Truth. But the nation s inequalities and injustices were so vast, obvious, and incendiary that they could not, credibly, be ignored. And so Quiet Street both acknowledged and elided the violence of society, through memorial silence.
I recently received a school-community-wide email from
Or so I heard, long after I graduated. As a student, I never learned the details of the story. It was not widely or formally discussed. No one ever explained, and few asked. I knew only that to speak on Quiet Street was forbidden. In ten years at the school, on nearly a thousand bus trips, I remember none of my peers breaking the rule. Such was its mysterious power. What was going on? I recently asked some of my old classmates. All remembered Quiet Street, and some vague version of the origin story above. One said this:
Seems kind of silly, and also, I don t know, vaguely racist, maybe? You re basically like, If we re not quiet on this street then the horrible people who live here are going to jump us, you know what I mean? . . . Maybe not even vaguely racist. Maybe overtly?
My classmate understates the problem. Quiet Street was the manifestation of a culture that preferred silence to discussion of race and class. These issues could not be discussed without raising questions that might undermine, even reveal as hollow, the school s motto: Honor et Veritas, or Honor and Truth. But the nation s inequalities and injustices were so vast, obvious, and incendiary that they could not, credibly, be ignored. And so Quiet Street both acknowledged and elided the violence of society, through memorial silence.
I recently received a school-community-wide email from
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Autoren-Porträt von Nick Mcdonell
NICK McDONELL is the author of the novels Twelve, The Third Brother, An Expensive Education, and The Council of Animals, as well as a work of political theory, The Civilization of Perpetual Movement, and four books of reportage on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including The Bodies in Person. He has contributed reporting and essays to Harper s Magazine, London Review of Books, Libération, The Paris Review, newyorker.com, and TIME, among other publications. His work has been published in twenty-three countries and appeared on best-seller lists around the world.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Nick Mcdonell
- 2023, 144 Seiten, Maße: 13,2 x 21 cm, Gebunden, Englisch
- Verlag: Pantheon
- ISBN-10: 0593316789
- ISBN-13: 9780593316788
- Erscheinungsdatum: 21.09.2023
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
"An elegant confessional of the excesses of the ruling classes told in a kind of travelogue through sybaritic circles of hell....the lessons are as familiar as Croesus and Gatsby."Washington Post
"Rich (pun half-intended) with anecdotal details from a life spent between the Upper East Side, the Hamptons, and all the other playgrounds of the wealthy, McDonell has done what for many in his orbit would have found unthinkable: He says the quiet part loud."
New York Magazine
"Meticulous...[in] McDonell s somewhat ironically titled book...it quickly becomes apparent that there s nothing quiet about the one percent s deceptively cordial appearance."
Chicago Review of Books
"Unsparing...Honest...I'm meant to be titillated, and I am."
Bookforum
"In delicate, persuasive, and beautiful prose, McDonell blows the notion of meritocracy sky-high"
Airmail
"Quiet Street is an exquisitely rendered horror story about American inequity, and how it mindlessly, immorally, reproduces itself. Unlike most such stories, however, this one left me believing in the possibility (and necessity) of drastic change. Nick McDonell writes with a scalpel in one hand, and in the other, a bushel of grace."
Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom
When Nick McDonell published his first novel at seventeen three years after I d published mine at forty-four I was impressed by the book as well as the WTF precocity. Now, he s almost as old as I was then, and he s put out about as many books as I have. This one is a bracingly frank, clear-eyed chronicle of his ultra-privileged golden youth in The Bubble, as he calls it, and his ongoing search for how he ought to use or forego some of that privilege now. If everyone this fortunate examined their lives this thoughtfully, the world would be better off.
Kurt Andersen, author of Evil Geniuses
"An earnest and piercing examination of
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the mindset of the upper class"
Publishers Weekly
Friendships with Upper East Side elites, attendance at prestigious schools like Buckley, Harvard, and Oxford, and travel to exotic locations . . . as McDonell illuminates a rarified world of money, power, and connections, he also offers candidly sobering insight into the systemic cultural mechanisms designed to protect long-standing social inequalities. An eloquent and compelling study.
Kirkus Reviews
Publishers Weekly
Friendships with Upper East Side elites, attendance at prestigious schools like Buckley, Harvard, and Oxford, and travel to exotic locations . . . as McDonell illuminates a rarified world of money, power, and connections, he also offers candidly sobering insight into the systemic cultural mechanisms designed to protect long-standing social inequalities. An eloquent and compelling study.
Kirkus Reviews
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