Introduction

From the bestselling author of There Are No Children Here, 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.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of March 2019: In An American Summer, Alex Kotlowitz turns his compassionate investigative eye back to the urban violence of the Windy City. In order to understand the level of violence that still plagues Chicago, Kotlowitz chronicles the events of a single summer in some of the city’s most neglected neighborhoods. Of the people Kotlowitz profiles, some end up dead, while others have committed violent acts, including murder. And far too many others are the collateral damage of revenge, pride, and poverty. There are a shocking number of children in Chicago who suffer from high levels of anxiety, sleeplessness, and even auditory hallucinations as the result of the things they’ve seen. As the pages add up, so do the bullets and the collective grief--but also a deeper connection to what is happening. There is so much heartbreak here, from the social worker who makes valuable headway with a difficult student only to find herself cut from the school program, to the story of a young man courageous enough to name his cousin’s killer, who is later murdered for it. As he did in his bestseller There Are No Children Here, Kotlowitz gives readers an opportunity to see for themselves the lives and substance of the people behind the statistics. These are people who, without his book, may very easily stay hidden from view. --Seira Wilson, Amazon Book Review

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