Quiet Street: On American Privilege

An introspective, absorbing work of memoir and cultural criticism that rips back the curtain on New York City's elite, exposing how the ruling class-even when well-intentioned-perpetuates cycles of wealth, power, and injustice

Growing up on New York City's Upper East Side, Nick McDonell was surrounded by luxury-sailing lessons in the Hamptons and school galas at the Met, holidays on private jets and college parties behind Ivy League oak doors. It was this rarified life that he explored in his early novels. And, later, it was this same life that he sought to leave behind as a war correspondent abroad.
In Quiet Street, McDonell returns to the sidewalks of his youth, exhuming his own upbringing, and those of his wealthy peers, with bracing honesty. In summertime safaris and winters in Aspen, ill-omened handshakes and schoolyard microagressions, macabre hunting rituals and the even darker rites of dating, McDonell picks apart the rearing of the ruling class with painstaking detail, documenting how wealth and power are hoarded, encoded, and passed down from one generation to the next. Pointedly, he also demonstrates how outsiders-the poor, the non-white, the suburban-are kept in the dark.
Searing and precise yet always deeply human, Quiet Street examines the problem of America's ambivalent rich, whose vision of a more just world never seems to materialize. It begs the question: what will it take for the elite to share power?