An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago

by Alex Kotlowitz

Chicago is by no means the most dangerous city, not even close. Its homicide rate doesn’t even put it in the top ten. But the city has become a symbol for the personal and collective wreckage—a kind of protracted cry of distress—in the streets of the nation’s most impoverished and segregated neighborhoods. Citizens killing citizens, children killing children, police killing young black men. A carnage so long-lasting, so stubborn, so persistent, that it’s made it virtually impossible to have a reasonable conversation about poverty in the country and has certainly clouded any conversation about race.