The Berkeley Archipelago

In the Airtight Cage, Joseph Lyford presented a fine-grained portrait of the black and Puerto Rican underclass subsisting on 125 deteriorating blocks of Manhattan's West Side. Fifteen years later he brought that same approach to Berkeley, California where he found a once cohesive community that had degenerated into a civic archipelago inhabited by citizens who 'make alliances not on the basis of common purpose but of common enemies.'