Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty

A Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker

An indelible portrait of three children struggling to survive in the poorest neighborhood of the poorest large city in America

Kensington, Philadelphia, is distinguished only by its poverty. It is home to Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel, three Puerto Rican children who live among the most marginalized families in the United States. This is the story of their coming-of-age, which is beset by violence--the violence of homelessness, hunger, incarceration, stray bullets, sexual and physical assault, the hypermasculine logic of the streets, and the drug trade. In Kensington, eighteenth birthdays are not rites of passage but statistical miracles.

One mistake drives Ryan out of middle school and into the juvenile justice pipeline. For Emmanuel, his queerness means his mother's rejection and sleeping in shelters. School closures and budget cuts inspire Giancarlos to lead walkouts, which get him kicked out of the system. Although all three are high school dropouts, they are on a quest to defy their fate and their neighborhood and get high school diplomas.

In a triumph of empathy and drawing on nearly a decade of reporting, sociologist and policymaker Nikhil Goyal follows Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel on their mission, plunging deep into their lives as they strive to resist their designated place in the social hierarchy. In the process, Live to See the Day confronts a new age of American poverty, after the end of "welfare as we know it," after "zero tolerance" in schools criminalized a generation of students, after the odds of making it out are ever slighter.

Author: Nikhil Goyal
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 08/22/2023
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.19lbs
Size: 9.46h x 6.50w x 1.22d
ISBN13: 9781250850065
ISBN10: 1250850061
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Poverty & Homelessness
- Social Science | Social Classes & Economic Disparity
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Hispanic American Studies

About the Author
Nikhil Goyal is a sociologist, educator, and policymaker who has served as senior policy advisor on education and children for Senator Bernie Sanders on the U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget. He developed education, child care, preschool, and child tax credit federal legislation and led multi-million dollar projects that established the first-of-its-kind tuition-free college program for incarcerated people and correctional workers and expanded funding for rural public education in the state of Vermont. Additionally, he served as senior policy adviser to Congressman Jamaal Bowman. Goyal is the author of Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice. He has appeared on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, and written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time, the Nation, and other publications.