A REVIEW
Great civilizations are known for their cities. Babylon, Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad, Paris, London, and New York, all evoke stronger associations than their countries. Cities are both pearls and pillars. Although all great cities, like all great civilizations, have their cycles, only modern Western civilization has watched some of its finest cities simultaneously, as if on cue, degenerate from healthy multicultural metropoles to crime-ridden monocultural hellscapes in one generation.
Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities by 75-year-old American author, blogger, and urban native Jack Cashill tells the story of one of them: his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. The story of Newark is the story of families of generations of working-class immigrants who put aside their Old World animosities to forge the new American Dream, before experiencing its violent post-Sixties implosion. Cashill weaves together dozens of moving individual stories: the stories of people whose memories read like eulogies to what they lost and the city they abandoned to its fate.
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