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. 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. ( )

An in depth look at the tragedy caused by gun violence every day on the mean streets of Chicago. The author chose one Summer about four years ago and delves into the stories of victims and their families (and sometimes the shooters). The book fleshes out the real lives of the people involved. Some are innocent and some are guilty. Some know who shot them, some don't. Some are shot by the police and were innocent or guilty. The important thing are the human lives of real people and the unending cycle of violence that the people live through in Chicago with apparently no solution. ( )

Journalist and master storyteller Alex Kotlowitz revisits the summer of 2013 in Englewood and other impoverished Chicago neighborhoods. He reports on his interviews with (primarily) young black and Hispanic men who have been affected by gun violence, whether that's as perpetrators, victims, or as friends of victims. Often, as he emphasizes, these categories overlap. Kotlowitz transcends the stereotypes to reveal the longings, remorse, and love that is hidden in these young men behind the need to act tough, seek revenge, and embrace the thug life. Definitely a book worth reading. ( )

Powerful story-telling; he shows that real people ( even though flawed) , are in each shooting. The book doesn’t blame or find fault...it describes the anger and the impact on all sides of the violence. ( )

This is basically a recitation and recounting of the shootings and killings of young people of color in various blighted neighborhoods of Chicago. Despite the best efforts of families, schools, and social workers, guns are easily available and turf as small as one block must be defended with them. Without an improved economic reality, it is difficult to see how this will ever change. The police, frustrated by lack of cooperation of witnesses, are themselves frequently accused of corruption and of being guilty of some of the shootings. It becomes increasingly clear that the shooters rely on the fear of witnesses to continue their domestic terrorism. In cases cited here, witnesses brave enough to come forward and testify are themselves shot and killed. The anecdotes gathered by the author are made real by his vivid descriptions of the shooters and the victims and the families. He gives them the humanity that the streets rip away. ( )