Invisible Children: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City Author: Andrea Elliott Publisher: CITIC Press

【Editor's recommendation】

★ Pulitzer Prize-winning work, the author is the only woman to date to have won both the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism and the Pulitzer Prize for Book.

★ Won a total of 5 book awards in various categories and was nominated for 4 more.

★ Selected for Obama's 2021 Annual Reading List, The New York Times' Top 10 Books of 2021, Time's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2021, The Atlantic's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2021, Amazon's Best Nonfiction Books of 2021, and other 10 annual reading lists of famous American media and platforms.

★ This is not a story about tragedy being rewritten in the end, there are too many tragedies... Martin Luther King's famous saying that the arc of the moral universe will eventually "bend toward justice" does not seem to apply in this society. In such a society, love alone cannot overcome various obstacles.

★ It took 8 years to track and record, refer to and cite 14,325 documents of various types, and use delicate writing and historical perspective to show a girl struggling in a difficult situation, a family with poverty passed down from generation to generation, and a city where extreme poverty and super wealth may be separated by a street. "More thorough than Dickens, more desperate than Orwell."

★ "With the depth of Dickens' works," the book records the plight and struggle of a young girl, examines the products of American social structure and history, such as the gap between the rich and the poor, class stratification, native family, and racial discrimination, and questions the conscience of the city of New York and even the entire United States.

★ Tens of thousands of readers on the English reading website Goodreads gave it an extremely high score of 4.73.

★ Highly recommended by Chinese scholars Zhang Li, Mao Jian, Ma Ling and Li Songwei.

★ United Nations senior translator Lin Hua (who has worked at the United Nations headquarters for more than 30 years and was once the head of the Chinese interpretation group) leads readers on their reading journey of this book.

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【Content introduction】

Invisible Children is a non-fiction work written by Andrea Elliott, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and a professor at Princeton University, after eight years of tracking and recording, referring to and citing 14,325 documents of various types. It tells the story of the eight-year tortuous growth experience of a girl named Dasani. In this work with a grand sense of history, Elliott interweaves Dasani's childhood story with the history of her family, tracing their experience from slavery to migration to the north, as well as the family's plight and struggles in New York. Dasani grew up in an era when the homelessness crisis broke out in New York and the gap between the rich and the poor widened. In the absence of a stable living environment, she must guide her younger brothers and sisters to face a world full of hunger, violence, racism, and drug abuse. While leading her seven younger brothers and sisters to wander from one shelter to another, Dasani is also looking for a way to escape this fate. When she finally escapes this predicament and enters a boarding school, she faces a difficult question: What should you do if escaping poverty means abandoning your family and yourself?

Invisible Child uses delicate writing to show a girl struggling in difficult situations, a family with poverty passed down from generation to generation, and a city where extreme poverty and super wealth may be just one street away. But Dasani and her family are just a microcosm. The poverty, discrimination, class solidification and original family problems they face are the product of American history and social structure. This work, which "has the depth of Dickens' works" (Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar) and "is comparable to Orwell" (British Sunday Times), examines these issues on every page and questions the conscience of New York and even the entire United States.

This book won five book awards, including the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the 2022 Anthony Lucas Book Award, and was nominated for four other book awards. It was also selected for former US President Obama's 2021 Reading List, the New York Times' Top Ten Books of 2021, Time's Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 2021, the Atlantic Monthly's Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 2021, and Amazon's Best Nonfiction Books of 2021, among other 10 annual book lists of famous American media and platforms.

About the Author