An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago

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