Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the best-selling authors of Half the Sky and A Path Appears, have returned with a deeply personal new book: TIGHTROPE: Americans Reaching for Hope. Looking with clear eyes at our nation’s governmental failures over the past half-century, the authors examine the contemporary crisis in working-class America through the lens of the families Nicholas grew up within the rural, working-class town of Yamhill, Oregon. Join USC Annenberg in welcoming Kristof and WuDunn in conversation with Dean Willow Bay. 

This event is presented in partnership with the USC Speakers Committee.

About TIGHTROPE
“A deft and uniquely credible exploration of rural America, and of other left-behind pockets of our country. One of the most important books I’ve read on the state of our disunion.” — Tara Westover, author of Educated 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of the acclaimed, best-selling Half the Sky now issue a plea–deeply personal and told through the lives of real Americans–to address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half-century of governmental failure.

With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an “other America.” The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared.

Boxed lunches will be served.

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