Alex Kotlowitz

Welcome to the Henry Horner Homes! It is a public-housing project, located on the west-side of Chicago. The apartments are hot in the summer and even hotter in the winter. Poorly maintained, with broken down elevators, horrible plumbing and defunct appliances. The windows are blocked to prevent stray bullets and the occupants huddle in hallways, when the ubiquitous shooting begins.
Living in these conditions are two brothers, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 11 and 9. The author followed show more these boys for two years, in the late ‘80s, as they navigate, through a world filled with gangs, drug-dealers, welfare, over-burdened public defenders and dispassionate police. A life of violence and death, with “hope” being a foreign and elusive term.
This is an excellent nonfiction account and a perfect, eye-opening, reminder of how many live in America today. Highly recommended. show less

This excellent work of journalism weaves the stories of more than a dozen perpetrators and victims of violent crime, and their families and communities, into Chicago’s summer of 2013. It does so via Kotlowitz’s close-in reporting that at times is nearly oral history and, for me, is evocative of Studs Terkel. It’s compulsively readable and also unbearably tragic. In several cases, I was so moved that I Googled combinations of names and keywords to find updates.

At its least, the book has show more further informed my reactions to each day’s reports of violence. At its most, it inspires activism.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.) show less

One summer in Chicago, tracking the effects of violence both random and targeted on its victims—who include lots of people who weren’t physically injured but suffer from what they saw and felt every day. A lot of the violence is not police-related, and all of it is terrible, but the most outrageous parts involved the police because the state is supposed to protect citizens from violence, not inflict it. One man was shot for running from the cops; they framed him with a gun that was show more inoperable and still had a full complement of bullets, and the cops received commendations even as the city settled a lawsuit with the victim’s family. It’s not, Kotlowitz says, that people hate snitches as such, but providing evidence can be personally dangerous and isn’t all that likely to help (maybe 10% of shooters are arrested, and less than half of murders are solved—and the city considers cases solved when they’re convinced who did it, regardless of whether there’s an arrest), so many people don’t take the risk and many also take retribution into their own hands. show less

Well, what do you want to hear first? How well crafted this book is as word craft, or how perfectly this captures big city life for American-Americans while painting a vivid picture of a constant, relentless life of poverty in a country of immense wealth? This was not my first experience in reading this author's work. I was very impressed with the earlier work, There Are No Children Here. This book actually takes off from a direct connection to people portrayed in that much earlier work. show more I've been very fortunate lately to read books by superb non-fiction journalists, Rachel Louise Snyder and Isabelle Wilkerson, both of whom proved able to seemingly embed themselves into the lives and minds of those upon whom they were reporting to spectacular insights. This author, who did this with great skill in his earlier work, has somehow marinated his skills even more and deserves to be elevated to my own personal pantheon of great journalists. In essence, this book takes a single summer a few years back in Chicago and takes the reader deep into the violence of a major U.S. city notorious for its death count. Anyone who has studied the data knows that Chicago is not the worst offender in this area. (The one that is rarely even gets mentioned in the news.) Nevertheless, any city connected to someone the current U.S. president takes great joy in degrading in public is bound to get undue bad press. On the other hand, what is bad is bad. We're only talking a matter of degree. The author takes the reader deep into the jungle of this perpetual life of community violence in a series of interviews. Especially, early on, the author shifts the narrative approach to each setting he enters, giving the book a sense of a short story collection. In fact, one particular chapter is so masterfully presented and so emotionally wrought, I was taken back to the reaction I had to "Going to Meet the Man", James Baldwin's extraordinary story. One can read this or not. Personally, I don't think any one should make judgment on what is happening in Chicago without reading this book first. On the other hand, those who so publicly make negative judgments from big white houses in Washington, DC, do not read books. So there is that. show less