Review by New York Times Review
On JULY 22,2012, Darren Easterling was murdered in Park Forest, a mostly African-American suburb south of Chicago. Two days later, the local newspaper published a short article, headlined "Man Shot to Death in Park Forest Had Drug, Weapons Conviction," that highlighted his criminal history. The story did not directly blame Easterling for his own homicide, but the implication was unmistakable: This was a man who lived and died among coldblooded killers. He got what he should have expected, if not what he deserved. Easterling's mother, Lisa, tells a different story. In high school, her athletic son had been a football player and an avid fan of documentary films. He wrote sweet birthday cards and letters. He had two children, and was an attentive, affectionate father. Lisa was all-too-aware of his dark side. Years before, she had kicked him out of her house for dealing drugs. He had done time for carrying a gun. Lisa had long worried that he was heading for disaster, but she also saw how he could turn things around. Darren's death, in a drug deal that went haywire, sent her into a spiral of guilt, shame and sadness. When Darren's killer went on trial, Lisa wanted to forgive him and ask the court for leniency, but that proved wrenching, too. Stories like Lisa's and Darren's, told in dispatches covering three months during 2013, are the lifeblood of "An American Summer," the journalist Alex Kotlowitz's account of reckless brutality in the Chicago area's impoverished, segregated neighborhoods. Although the narrative is organized around events from one summer, Kotlowitz spent four years immersed in the grim worlds where homicide is rampant. His reporting spans that period, and beyond. Like Kotlowitz's now classic 1991 book, "There Are No Children Here," about two boys growing up in a Chicago housing project, "An American Summer" forgoes analysis and instead probes the human damage that stems from exposure to violence. What he finds is important. For instance, a destructive myth about people who live in Chicago's most dangerous neighborhoods is that they've grown hardened, numb to the atrocities that saturate daily life. Kotlowitz confesses to believing this, at least temporarily, in 1998, when Pharoah, a main character of "There Are No Children Here," seems unaffected by the murder of his taxi driver, which he witnesses up close. When Kotlowitz asks how he's doing, Pharoah replies flatly: "O.K. Why?" This exchange helps motivate Kotlowitz's investigation into how people "carry" violence, whether they are perpetrators, victims, witnesses or merely associated with those involved. Kotlowitz interviewed roughly 200 people, and his expansive cast of characters includes social workers, police officers, political officials, a beat reporter and convicted killers, as well as dozens of ordinary people - children and adults whose lives have been shredded by bullets and guns. Pharoah, he reports in "An American Summer," had been so traumatized by the shooting he witnessed that, some two decades later, he can't get it out of his mind. Over lunch in a restaurant, Pharoah hyperventilates and his eyes grow wide with fright as he tells Kotlowitz what happened. "It's like I'm there," he says, crouching down as if to take cover. Far from being inured to bloodshed, Pharoah, and others who live in America's most dangerous neighborhoods, experience the world like war veterans. As Kotlowitz puts it, "The violence is in his bones." It's deeper in Thomas, who grew up in Englewood, a rough, depopulated neighborhood on the South Side. Thomas was unlucky enough to live on 70th Place, a street so treacherous that some call it the "block of death," and to attend Harper High School, where, during his junior year, 21 students and recent graduates were wounded by gunfire and seven were shot and killed. When he was 10, his 11-year-old friend and neighbor, Nugget, was murdered at her own birthday party, and Thomas saw "her brain matter oozing out of her skull onto her braids." Months earlier, Thomas's older brother Leon got shot while playing on the sidewalk. Leon couldn't move his legs (and never would again), so Thomas sat with him, urging him to hold on until the ambulance arrived. That was elementary school. After that, Thomas would see a boy shot in the face, a friend shot in the leg, two men who had just been murdered in a car. He joined a gang, or "crew," called 7-0 for protection, de rigueur for boys on his block, but feared it wouldn't help. In June 2012, Thomas and his good friend Shakiki were hanging out on the front porch of a house near his when he spotted a hooded boy from a rival crew running toward them, gun in hand. Moments later Shakiki was flat on the porch's wooden slats, clutching her burning stomach. Eight hours later, she was dead. The aftermath is excruciating. Shakiki, we learn, had anticipated the shooting. Just as in "There Are No Children Here," where Pharoah's brother Lafayette declares that "if I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver," here Kotlowitz recounts that Shakiki had asked Anita, one of her school's two social workers, "if I die, will you write a note and put it in my casket?" This memory haunted Anita nearly as much as Shakiki's murder. She began having nightmares and waking up in tears. One side of her face went numb and she had trouble seeing. Before long she sought out counseling herself. Thomas fared worse. He struggled to concentrate and fell behind in school. He started shooting dice, smoking pot and threatening to hurt people. Some days he refused to go outside. The problem wasn't only that he'd lost another close friend; it was also that the prosecutor wanted him to be the key witness, and Thomas knew that testifying would make him a target once again. Only about one in 10 shooters gets arrested in Chicago. Kotlowitz emphasizes the "no-snitch code of the streets" as the reason. In his telling, it's fear of retribution, not status or honor, that keeps people silent. "Fear runs through these communities like a steady rip current," Kotlowitz says. A woman whose job is to support and encourage crime victims to testify instructs her own son not to after he's shot by a known assailant. When a social worker at Harper High School asks a student how his summer was, he replies, "Safe." Kotlowitz states plainly that this kind of fear and violence is concentrated in Chicago's black and Latino neighborhoods. The pattern is so widely taken for granted that one local newspaper printed the headline "Murder at a Good Address" after a homicide on tony Michigan Avenue. But Kotlowitz does not puzzle over the question of why, even in Chicago, black and Latino communities for the most part are safer than those featured in "An American Summer." Nor does he investigate why places like Englewood are so lethal. In recent years, social scientists have made great progress identifying neighborhood-level conditions that make violent crime more likely, from abandoned homes and empty lots to weak community organizations and widespread distrust of the police. As the sociologist Andrew V. Papachristos has written, the gap between Chicago's lowest and highest homicide neighborhoods has expanded dramatically since 2006, owing to factors in the local social environment. Kotlowitz, however, depicts the question of what causes urban crime to rise and fall as essentially unanswerable. "Anyone who tells you they know is lying." This is a curious position, especially given the trend (hardly mentioned in "An American Summer") that criminologists consider the most important fact about urban violence in recent decades: Most American cities have experienced far less of it than anyone predicted, and national experts feel more confident than ever about what works. Last year, for instance, New York City had the lowest homicide rate in nearly 70 years, and since 1990 the homicide rates in Los Angeles, Dallas and Washington, D.C., have dropped more than 70 percent. Chicago, and a handful of hyper-segregated, postindustrial cities, including St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and Memphis, have failed to achieve such impressive numbers. Yet in 2013, Chicago's homicide rate was roughly half of what it was in 1990, and in 2018 it was one-third of the 2013 rate. Chicago's reputation as second to none for moral chaos - "citizens killing citizens, children killing children, police killing young black men" - is due mainly to its population size. President Trump, who called Chicago a "war zone" and threatened to send in the National Guard, and Spike Lee, who named his 2015 film "ChiRaq," have helped make Chicago the national symbol of murderous violence. Kotlowitz, despite good intentions, has reinforced this view. Of course, the fact that most American cities, and most Chicago neighborhoods, are now much safer than they were 20 years ago does not make the violence that Kotlowitz documents any less devastating or significant. "An American Summer" is a powerful indictment of a city and a nation that have failed to protect their most vulnerable residents, or to register the depth of their pain. It is also a case study in the constraints of a purely narrative approach to the problems of inequality and social suffering. Kotlowitz aims to tell unforgettable stories about the afterlife of homicide, how it penetrates the minds, bodies and communities of those it touches. He succeeds. You are nauseated, outraged, haunted, sad. But when you put the book down you are paralyzed. You hear the president call for military intervention, the mayor for better schools, the pastor for church. You have no answers or explanations. You have no idea what to do. eric KLINENBERG is a professor of sociology at New York University and the author, most recently, of "Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization and the Decline of Civic Life."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Kotlowitz is an immersion journalist of the highest order, spending years investigating complicated, anguished, and unjust predicaments. He conducts hundreds of intensely personal interviews, embedding himself in people's lives as they cope with loss and adversity. Chicago has been his primary turf, most famously in There Are No Children Here (1991), the watershed book about public-housing projects, which was designated by the New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. Since its publication, four of the children Kotlowitz became close to have been murdered. Their deaths are part of a horrific Chicago statistic: "between 1990 and 2010, 14,033 people were killed, another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire." Kotlowitz set out to document how this tragic plague of street violence derails, burdens, and poisons lives for generations. He chose to chronicle in factual and psychological detail the carnage of one summer in Chicago, that of 2013, which, he ruefully observes, is considered one of the tamer seasons, during which 172 people were killed and 793 wounded. Kotlowitz's self-assigned mission was to trace the web of havoc, grief, fear, anger, and helplessness engendered by the bloodshed ravaging woefully undersupported African American and Hispanic communities. He spoke with people in their homes and workplaces, neighborhood restaurants and hangouts, courts and jails, listening with profound receptivity, respect, and sympathy, and becoming deeply involved himself. His account introduces readers to mothers mourning murdered children and devastated by shame and guilt over sons responsible for violence, and to shooting survivors left physically paralyzed or afflicted with debilitating depression. The wellspring for this consummate inquiry into chronic urban violence is Kotlowitz's work on the Emmy-winning documentary film The Interrupters (2011), which features activists with CeaseFire, a violence-prevention group, among them Eddie Bocanegra. A guiding light in these pages, Eddie has spent most of his life trying to atone for a murder he committed at age 17, when he was pulled into the maelstrom of retaliatory gang bloodshed. As Eddie served time, earned college degrees, and devoted himself to helping others, he realized that people in his neighborhood were as shattered by street combat as his war-veteran brother was by his service in Iraq, inspiring him to found Urban Warriors, which brings together military and civilian PTSD sufferers to help each other heal. Kotlowitz writes with masterful economy and concreteness, and from his meticulous narrative springs a rich spectrum of emotions like light reflecting off high-rise windows. In addition to confiding conversations, Kotlowitz was also granted access to journals and letters, including the extraordinarily noble correspondence between an incarcerated killer and the mother of his victim. Each individual Kotlowitz so intimately profiles captures one's heart. There is young Thomas, whose best friend, Shakaki, was killed while they talked on a front porch; and there is Anita, the devoted social worker who gives her all to help Thomas overcome his despair. Another unforgettable chapter portrays a man who finally gets out of prison and joyfully reunites with his son, who soon after is fatally shot in a case of mistaken identity. Kotlowitz recounts stories of people who are threatened or killed for going to the police or testifying in court, vanquishing the myth that people in high-crime neighborhoods don't cooperate with the authorities because of some sort of code of loyalty. Unjustified shootings by police further banish trust and hope. Kotlowitz's hard-hitting and powerfully clarifying dispatches bring into the light people who love their families and friends and who work hard to take care of others, yet who are undermined, betrayed, and brutalized by violence, racism, poverty, and an unconscionable lack of understanding, caring, resources, and social and political will. Kotlowitz writes, It's my hope that these stories will help upend what we think we know. It is our hope that this book will be widely read and discussed.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here) examines the epidemic of violent crime in Chicago through the events of the summer of 2013, narrating the stories of victims and their families, social workers, and perpetrators. A high school student and former gang member's one-night spree of violence threatens to run his entire future off-course. A mother finds the strength to forgive her son's killer, arguing on his behalf in court. A teen haunted by a friend's death at a birthday party watches helplessly as another friend is gunned down. A man spends a "day of atonement" each year on the anniversary of the day he took a life, visiting with victims of violent crime. A witness to a teenager's death comes forward to tell the victim's mother that police officers shot her son and planted a gun at the scene. Kotlowitz has a ruminative, almost poetic sensibility, describing for example how "the acronym RIP... is everywhere... tattooed on people's bodies... scrawled on the sides of buildings. Embossed on T-shirts and jackets. It's as if these communities are piecing together the equivalent of a war memorial." The violence is made palpable but never romanticized. Kotlowitz's approach is empathetic in this a bold, unflinching depiction of an ever-lengthening crisis. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here) examines the seemingly endless violence that continues to touch those living in Chicago's neediest neighborhoods, interviewing loved ones, bystanders, advocates, victims, and perpetrators alike to make sense of an increasingly dire and complicated situation. Recorded over the course of a three-month period during the summer of 2013 when 172 people were killed and 793 were wounded by gunfire, Kotlowitz paints an intimate portrait of life in the city, never diminishing the fear and anxiety that runs through each account. Kotlowitz treats each of his sources with dignity and grace, shedding light on the influence of loss, poverty, privilege, and lack of opportunity on gun violence and gang culture. VERDICT Kotlowitz weaves a message of survival and remembrance that encourages readers to take a hard look at violence and justice in America. A powerful selection for anyone interested in social policy, gun violence, and social justice.-Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib., Miami © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A chronicle of dreams and gun violence one summer in the city of Chicago.In 1991, Kotlowitz (Journalism/Northwestern Univ.; Never a City So Real: A Walk in Chicago, 2004, etc.) published the modern classic There Are No Children Here (1991), which told the story of brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah and their experiences in one of Chicago's violent housing projects. Years later, the author received a call in the middle of the night and learned that Pharoah may have been involved in a murder. In his latest powerful sociological exploration, the author masterfully captures the summer of 2013 in neglected Chicago neighborhoods, rendering intimate profiles of residents and the "very public" violence they face every day. One example is Eddie Bocanegra, who killed a rival gang member as a teenager. "Eddie did the unimaginable," writes Kotlowitz. "He took another human life. I suppose for some that might be all you need to know. For others, it may be all you want to know about him. And that's what Eddie fears the most, that this moment is him. That there's no other way to view him." We also meet Anita Stewart, a dedicated social worker who watched one of her favorite students get murdered and another struggle with the aftermath. Heartbreakingly, the author writes early on, "I could tell story after story like this, of mothers who drift on a sea of heartache, without oars and without destination." Throughout, Kotlowitz raises significant issues about the regions where violence has become far too routine. "After the massacre at Newtown and then at Parkland we asked all the right questions," he writes. However, "in Chicago neighborhoods like Englewood or North Lawndale, where in one year they lose twice the number of people killed in Newtown, no one's asking those questions." Kotlowitz offers a narrative that is as messy and complicated and heart-wrenching as life itself: "This is a book, I suppose, about that silenceand the screams and howling and prayers and longing that it hides."A fiercely uncompromisingand unforgettableportrait. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
