Review by Choice Review
This splendid and nuanced volume provides long-needed corrections to images from literature, cinema, news, and social science that have reduced Parisian suburbs to a dystopian vision of crime-ridden towers and despairing immigrants. Instead, this team examines working- and middle-class home developments where pioneers of humble urban origins have meshed, sometimes uneasily, with both newer immigrants and those who have escaped the towers. These complex portraits of people who find shared meanings in home, children, and even minor upward mobility should be familiar to Americans versed in similar stories of Levittown and myriad developments across the US, even as both communities deal with complicated issues of race, class, and immigration. Indeed, these French suburbs also show how anxieties about status and position vis-à-vis newcomers turn many--including some immigrants themselves--toward right-wing nationalism. Given the rich, careful data, the complex analyses, and the sensitive evocations of families divided by place, decisions, and success, this book should stimulate vastly enriched, comparative examinations of metropolitan Paris in its global context. It is also a provocative read about class, place, education, aspiration, and anxiety for social scientists and citizens worldwide. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. --Gary Wray McDonogh, Bryn Mawr College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
