THANK YOU: THIRD PRINTING! KINDLE!
NOT IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD
How Bigotry Shaped a
Great American City
is now in a third printing, with a paperback edition due in September. It is also available for the Kindle, amazon.com's e-reader. This latter news is significant. We are in the midst of an epochal transition from printed books to e-readers. This is becoming increasingly evident every day, thanks to revolutionary breakthroughs in voice recognition technologies.
Already today, if you buy my book on the Kindle, you don't even have to read it yourself. The Kindle will read it to you. (Just recently, by accident, I discovered that my MacBook Pro also reads. Try it on yours: Just activate the speech recognition function, highlight any text -- including emails and facebook -- and press a command!
Also, voice recognition will increasingly allow users of smartphones to give voice commands to the phone -- "Where can I buy Not in My Neighborhood ?" -- and the phone will give you the answer. (The correct answer: At your favorite bookseller or through amazon.com). We live in exciting times.
Happy holidays to all. Your support has been marvelous.
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MEDIA
Video from City Paper which honored Not in My Neighborhood as its book of the year.
Book TV: Antero Pietila "Not in My Neighborhood"
Ivan Dee introduces author Antero Pietila, who talks about his new book "Not in My Neighborhood." Mr. Dee discusses the house's recently released works and upcoming publications.
(YouTube)
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Author Antero Pietila discusses Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City.
(large file)
Praise for NOT IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD
'A page-turner, chock full of riveting and shocking stories and vivid, unforgettable characters...'
'A blockbuster book, full of memorable characters, dramatic choices, and tragic policy failures...'
'A great, exhaustively researched account...'
Published by Ivan R. Dee, the book is sold in local bookstores and worldwide by amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, even Japan and India.
This redline map guided racial change
During the Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration bailed out more than one million homeowners who were in danger of losing their homes. It also prepared real estate risk maps for 239 U.S. cities, with the aim of preventing the exposure of lenders to bad loans in the future. Neighborhoods in those cities were assessed according to the age and condition of housing stock but also on the basis of their residents’ race, ethnicity, religion, economic status and homogeneity.
The story of urban America
An interview with Antero Pietila
What is your book about?
It’s about how race shaped the cities in which we live. It looks at a 130-year span of racial change, from early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of the white flight after World War II. It’s an all-American story. It’s real estate history, social history, African-American history, Jewish history, Catholic history.
How is this relevant?
Certain patterns keep repeating themselves. Take subprime mortgages. In the 1990s minorities were targeted for predatory loans on properties they could not afford. The same thing happened from the 1940s onward. Because blacks had no access to conventional financing, they had to buy from speculators known as blockbusters, who provided 100 percent financing at predatory terms. Whole neighborhoods around the country changed color within ten or fifteen years. Speculators intimidated white homeowners to sell cheap, then flipped the properties and sold them to blacks, often doubling or tripling their acquisition price. Millions and millions of white Americans fled the nation’s cities to the suburbs during that white flight.
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