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Love and Death in Chicago
by Alex Kotlowitz
Book Reviewed by:A richly textured, heartrending portrait of love and death in Chicago's most turbulent neighborhoods.
The numbers are staggering: over the past twenty years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire. What does that do to the spirit of individuals and community? Drawing on his decades of experience, Alex Kotlowitz set out to chronicle one summer in the city, writing about individuals who have emerged from the violence and whose stories capture the capacity - and the breaking point - of the human heart and soul. The result is a spellbinding collection of deeply intimate profiles that upend what we think we know about gun violence in America. Among others, we meet a man who as a teenager killed a rival gang member and twenty years later is still trying to come to terms with what he's done; a devoted school social worker struggling with her favorite student, who refuses to give evidence in the shooting death of his best friend; the witness to a wrongful police shooting who can't shake what he has seen; and an aging former gang leader who builds a place of refuge for himself and his friends.
Applying the close-up, empathic reporting that made There Are No Children Here a modern classic, Kotlowitz offers a piercingly honest portrait of a city in turmoil. These sketches of those left standing will get into your bones. This one summer will stay with you.
In An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago, Alex Kotlowitz patiently takes the reader through the streets, neighborhoods and institutions that are both the cause and the result of ongoing violence. More importantly, he humanizes the problem through personal stories and deep immersion in the lives of real people who have been affected...continued
Full Review
(1072 words)
(Reviewed by Rose Rankin).
When people talk about Chicago, the endemic violence inevitably comes up, along with a sense of helplessness about how to stop it. That helplessness leads to apathy, and the feeling that the neighborhoods torn apart by gun violence are forsaken, failed places. But this attitude is as much a cause as it is an effect of crime and violence. In her memoir Becoming, Michelle Obama articulated the connotations of failure with Black neighborhoods: "There were predatory real estate agents roaming South Shore all the while, whispering to home owners that they should sell before it was too late, that they'd help them get out while you still can. The inference being that failure was coming, that it was inevitable, that it has already half arrived. You...
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Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
An American Summer is at turns shocking, heart-rending, and deeply moving. But it is always important. This is about the soul of our country.
