Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Sweeping work of narrative nonfiction: A triple hitter in the categories that TNP publishes well: racial justice/segregation, economic inequality, and legal studies.
Well-suited Platform: Lanahan's radio series "The Lines Between Us" won Columbia University's DuPont Award for public interest journalism and he participated--along with several high-profile journalists including Maria Hinajosa, and Michelle Norris--in The Aspen Institute's 3 day forum on Race, Journalism, and Society
Strong credentials and media connections: Author writes with dazzling authority on Baltimore as a longtime resident, sociologist, and reporter with deep connections to regional print, radio, and online media. Building on his extensive public radio ties, he is working to organize radio and events in several cities that would pull in local players to tailor the conversations for each local market.
Supported by philanthropic and strategic initiatives: The original radio series was backed by high-profile foundations (Baltimore Community Foundation, Ethics & Excellence Journalism Foundation, Open Society Foundation) and this book is partially underwritten by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, who will be a key partner in getting out word of the book to their expansive networks.
Synopsis
A masterful narrative--with echoes of Evicted and The Color of Law--that brings to life the structures, policies, and beliefs that divide us
Mark Lange and Nicole Smith have never met, but if they make the moves they are contemplating--Mark, a white suburbanite, to West Baltimore, and Nicole, a black woman from a poor city neighborhood, to a prosperous suburb--it will defy the way the Baltimore region has been programmed for a century. It is one region, but separate worlds. And it was designed to be that way.
In this deeply reported, revelatory story, duPont Award-winning journalist Lawrence Lanahan chronicles how the region became so highly segregated and why its fault lines persist today. Mark and Nicole personify the enormous disparities in access to safe housing, educational opportunities, and decent jobs. As they eventually pack up their lives and change places, bold advocates and activists--in the courts and in the streets--struggle to figure out what it will take to save our cities and communities: Put money into poor, segregated neighborhoods? Make it possible for families to move into areas with more opportunity?
The Lines Between Us is a riveting narrative that compels reflection on America's entrenched inequality--and on where the rubber meets the road not in the abstract, but in our own backyards. Taking readers from church sermons to community meetings to public hearings to protests to the Supreme Court to the death of Freddie Gray, Lanahan deftly exposes the intricacy of Baltimore's hypersegregation through the stories of ordinary people living it, shaping it, and fighting it, day in and day out.
This eye-opening account of how a city creates its black and white places, its rich and poor spaces, reveals that these problems are not intractable; but they are designed to endure until each of us--despite living in separate worlds--understands we have something at stake.