States of Neglect at WORD Bookstore with William Kleinknecht and Guy Sterling

February 21, 2023
- 7:00 PM
WORD Bookstore Jersey City
29 MCWILLIAMS PL,
Jersey City NJ

Please join The New Press at WORD Bookstore in Jersey City for the launch of veteran journalist and author William Kleinknecht's States of Neglect: How Red-State Leaders Have Failed Their Citizens and Undermined America. Kleinknecht will be joined by Guy Sterling, a longtime reporter for The Star-Ledger.

In States of Neglect, journalist William Kleinknecht surveys the landscape of neglect in states including Texas, Florida, and Arizona through the experiences of a rich cast of characters. He visits environmental dead zones in the Texas Gulf region. He investigates Arizona’s abandonment of public education and its corrupt charter school industry. He shows how Mississippi’s denuded health care system has made the Magnolia State the sickest in the nation. And he explains how North Carolina allows its people to sink into poverty while catering to the needs of corporations. As a postscript, Kleinknecht proposes how progressive states on either coast might join in a compact of “progressive federalism” that uses their superior economic and cultural resources to counter the influence of the far right.

William Kleinknecht is a longtime newspaper reporter who covered politics, government, criminal justice, and the environment for the Detroit Free Press, New York Daily News, and Newark Star-Ledger. The author of The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America, The New Ethnic Mobs: The Changing Face of Organized Crime in America, and States of Neglect: How Red-State Leaders Have Failed Their Citizens and Undermined America (The New Press), he lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey.
 
Guy Sterling is an American journalist, author and historian. He spent most of his 35-year newspaper career as a reporter with The Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey, primarily covering the courts and criminal justice matters, the Meadowlands sports complex and the New Jersey Mafia.