Random Family
LeBlanc spent eleven years embedded in the lives of two women and their families in the South Bronx drug economy, producing a work of immersive journalism that reads like a novel but is more damning than any polemic about poverty, mass incarceration, and the crack epidemic's aftermath. A landmark of American journalism.
LeBlanc erases herself so completely that the method becomes the question. Eleven years of reporting are presented as an omniscient novel: no sourcing, no visible interviews, no account of how her presence shaped what she saw. Four hundred pages of accumulating detail with no analysis to hold them; by the third incarceration, the relentlessness numbs more than it indicts.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
