FUCKED AT BIRTH

An open-hearted American travelogue through the new underclass.

The raw title comes from a piece of graffiti Maharidge saw at a boarded-up gas station in the California desert. He then drove across the country to see if people could relate to the sentiment. Sadly yet unsurprisingly, many could. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author is here to sound a warning: The pandemic is leaving a trail of widespread poverty, homelessness, opioid abuse, and other maladies in its wake. Along his journey, the author visited good Samaritans running food banks and homeless encampments. He talked to professors and scavengers. Some of the new underclass still have their fancy cars; more don’t have any car at all. Maharidge bears witness, but he does more than that. He brings to bear his experience as a former newspaper reporter covering the down-and-out. More important still, he meets everyone where they live. Indeed, the book is a barely restrained demand for readers to pay attention to the have-nots lest you wake up tomorrow and find yourself among them. “We with white-collar employment make the assumption that a majority of Americans are exactly like us because most of us never interact with the working class,” writes the author. A student of the Great Depression, Maharidge understands the similarities with current times, but he also sees the differences: During the Depression, the homeless at least had the admittedly squalid Hooverville camps. Today, state and city laws are designed to make them get up and go…where? This is a book ripped from the headlines, from Black Lives Matter to recently thriving downtowns stripped of office workers and service workers. Those catching the brunt of it all, those with the steepest hills to climb, may have been fucked at birth. But for everyone, as Maharidge observes, the feeling of safety is folly.

A sharp wake-up call to heed the new Depression and to recognize the humanity of those hit hardest.