Disillusioned
Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs
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Disillusioned
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Narrated by:
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Benjamin Herold
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Bethany Smith
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Written by:
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Benjamin Herold
About this listen
Through the stories of five American families, a masterful and timely exploration of how hope, history, and racial denial collide in the suburbs and their schools
Outside Atlanta, a middle-class Black family faces off with a school system seemingly bent on punishing their teenage son. North of Dallas, a conservative white family relocates to an affluent suburban enclave, but can’t escape the changes sweeping the country. On Chicago’s North Shore, a multiracial mom joins an ultraprogressive challenge to the town’s liberal status quo. In Compton, California, whose suburban roots are now barely recognizable, undocumented Hispanic parents place their gifted son’s future in the hands of educators at a remarkable elementary school. And outside Pittsburgh, a Black mother moves to the same street where author Benjamin Herold grew up, then confronts the destructive legacy left behind by white families like his.
Disillusioned braids these human stories together with penetrating local and national history to reveal a vicious cycle undermining the dreams upon which American suburbia was built. For generations, upwardly mobile white families have extracted opportunity from the nation’s heavily subsidized suburbs, then moved on before the bills for maintenance and repair came due, leaving the mostly Black and Brown families who followed to clean up the ensuing mess. But now, sweeping demographic shifts and the dawning realization that endless expansion is no longer feasible are disrupting this pattern, forcing everyday families to confront a truth their communities were designed to avoid: The suburban lifestyle dream is a Ponzi scheme whose unraveling threatens us all.
How do we come to terms with this troubled history? How do we build a future in which all children can thrive? Drawing upon his decorated career as an education journalist, Herold explores these pressing debates with expertise and perspective. Then, alongside Bethany Smith—the mother from his old neighborhood, who contributes a powerful epilogue to the book—he offers a hopeful path toward renewal. The result is nothing short of a journalistic masterpiece.©2023 Benjamin Herold (P)2023 Penguin Audio
What the critics say
“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
“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