Another excellently written but sobering account of life in neighborhoods of segregated Chicago by Kotlowitz.

An American Summer is a riveting inside look in to the lives of those living in the rough areas of Chicago. Stories of young men who grew up surrounded by the ever growing violence in chicago. Chicago is known for related violence, low income, and segregated neighborhoods. Most of the violence being tied into gang violence.
The author interviewed social workers, police officers, convicted killers, politicians etc. The young men being interviewed basically were forced to join these violent gangs to protect either themselves or their families. They believe in the "No Snitching" rule and frown upon law enforcement.

This book gives you an insightful look at how terrifying it is just to walk down the street with a fear of possibly getting shot or being a victim of some type of violent crime. One young man in particular talks about being a kid and killing a gang rival and 20 years later still thinking about it. Things like that just mess with your mental stability. It's so heartbreaking seeing what these young men are going through. What could have been done to prevent all this? I think every school, including colleges and universities that deal with Criminal justice need to have this book in their curriculum. It's definitely one of those eye opening books. I'm so glad I had a chance to read this. This is one of those books that sticks with you forever. Thank You to NetGalley and Nan A. Talese for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Tragic, moving, and compelling. Another fantastic work of nonfiction by one of America's greatest writers.

Why would, I a 60+ year old, white, medium income female living in middle America be interested in what happens in a predominately African American, Chicago neighborhood during the summer of 2013? Good question.

First, I am a sucker for investigative journalism. Second, and perhaps most important, I think it is important to read outside our comfort zones. I remember hearing about the escalating violence in Chicago on the nightly news. I may or may not have looked up from my tablet and said something like - "oh, isn't that a shame" or "why can't people get their act together".

Mr. Kotlowitz presents us with a very well written book. It is obvious that this is a subject near and dear to his heart. In reading it, I found out why it really is a shame that there is so much gun violence. Or that it's not so easy for someone to get their act together when living under circumstances outlined in this book. For me, the most important lesson was to not be so quick to judge. This was a real eye opener.

My thanks to Doubleday Books and Netgalley.

AN AMERICAN SUMMER by Alex Kotlowitz: Our incoming students have read There Are No Children Here as part of the curriculum for more than a decade and this new work, sadly, offers additional impressions of "Love and Death in Chicago." Kotlowittz writes, "consider that in Chicago, the police have tried community policing, SWAT teams, data to predict shooters, full saturation of troubled neighborhoods, efforts to win over gang members. And the shootings continue. ... What works? After twenty years of funerals and hospital visits, I don't feel like I'm much closer to knowing." Instead, in AN AMERICAN SUMMER, he seeks to share stories of those involved in the violence of "how amid the devastation, many still manage to stay erect in a world that's slumping around them. How, despite the bloodshed, some manage, heroically, not only to push on but also to push back." The violence and despair is hard to read at times, but there is resilience, too, as Kotlowitz profiles twenty days, including Mother's Day and Father's Day, during the summer of 2013. The work is based on interviews with roughly 200 people over several years, reflections on his time embedded in a homicide unit, and numerous visits to homes, workplaces, jails, and court rooms. AN AMERICAN SUMMER received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly.

One summer in Chicago, tracking the effects of violence both random and targeted on its victims—who include lots of people who weren’t physically injured but suffer from what they saw and felt every day. A lot of the violence is not police-related, and all of it is terrible, but the most outrageous parts involved the police because the state is supposed to protect citizens from violence, not inflict it. One man was shot for running from the cops; they framed him with a gun that was inoperable and still had a full complement of bullets, and the cops received commendations even as the city settled a lawsuit with the victim’s family. It’s not, Kotlowitz says, that people hate snitches as such, but providing evidence can be personally dangerous and isn’t all that likely to help (maybe 10% of shooters are arrested, and less than half of murders are solved—and the city considers cases solved when they’re convinced who did it, regardless of whether there’s an arrest), so many people don’t take the risk and many also take retribution into their own hands.

Thank to Doubleday and Netgalley for the advanced copy of An American Summer. This is another important non-fiction title chronicling our country today and I recommend it to all with an interest in social justice. As another reviewer said, we are lucky to have authors writing about subjects such as this and hopefully readers will come away a little more educated and also a little (or a lot) more compassionate.

Spectacular book. I've been a big fan of Alex Kotlowitz ever since I read There Are No Children Here in college. As a Chicagoan, I've been waiting for a book like this for years. It will undoubtedly be required reading for years to come.

We are very lucky in these times to have sociologists and journalists such as Beth Macy, Matthew Desmond, Sam Quiniones and Kathryn Edin writing about what's happening in our country. Alex Kotlowitz has been writing about South Chicago since "There Are No Children Here" in 1991., returning now to his old neighborhoods to write about the mad epidemic of murder there.

Kotlowitz says he originally planned to report on the summer of 2013, but he found that the repercussions of each shooting lasted far beyond the end of hot weather. These stories are hard to read, both the killings themselves and the horrible pain the deaths bring to the survivors.

Kotlowitz says he does not aim to find a reason for what's happening in Chicago, which he describes as a collective madness. Ultimately, he suggests fear as the most likely spark of this tragic cycle.

Masterful and heartbreaking, "An American Summer" speaks of tragedy and trauma in our country. How do we stop these killings? Can we? Powerful stuff.

Kotlowitz's portrait of the summer of 2013 in Chicago layers story upon devastating story of gun violence, revealing the full complexity of how it affects individuals, families, and communities. It combines the reportorial depth of a book like Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx with the breadth of a book like Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives. In general, Kotlowitz stays the heck out of the way of his subjects, centering their perspectives as the press and government rarely do. (There were a few exceptions, though. Speaking of Mark Kirk's tour of Englewood with Bobby Rush after the former proposed the reductive solution of eradicating a certain gang, Kotlowitz writes "Kirk, I've got to say, was a good sport," then quotes him saying "I'm willing to play the role of the educable white guy." The ROLE?)

Would be a wonderful read for anyone in politics, law enforcement, or - well, America.

There Are No Children Here is one of the best books I've ever read and this is definitely up there with that one! With so much international attention on the violence of Chicago, it is refreshing to read such a nuanced story of the tragedies that happen here. Must-read!

This was a hard book to read - it was totally and completing devastating. Chicago is a city in turmoil. It's a city we hear about all too often in the news. It's a city with the strictest gun laws in the country but has more shootings each weekend than in Afghanistan. Young black men are dying at rates that are unfathomable. Alex Kotlowitz opens the readers eyes to not only the horror that's taking place in the city but also the aftermath of that horror; the mothers who have lost their sons, the siblings who have lost their brothers and sisters, the kids who will never know their parents. When the news hits the airwaves, the country hears the staggering numbers - 60 shot over the weekend, 12 killed, children as young as 4 getting hit by stray bullets; it's a never ending barrage of horror and death. This book opened my eyes to the realness of this tragedy - it became more than just a number.

I was astounded by people's ability to forgive, people's ability to pull themselves up and keep going. It's true that so many of these people don't have a choice but to carry on - they have more children to care for, more life to live. But the ability of communities to rebuild and people to forgive was a small silver lining in this otherwise deeply sad and confounding book. I won't soon forget this book and the feelings of helplessness that it left me with. And, I won't soon forget the love that I have for the city of Chicago.

This is a rough one. I don't know how to recommend this to people, except to say that if you love the city of Chicago, as so many of us do, then you know what it's like to live here and love it while people are being shot and dying, every day. And you know how that makes you feel, and it's not a good feeling. This book attempts to put you, the white Chicagoan, into the thick of it. And the visceral pain is hard to get across in a book, and it's somewhat successful, as much as it can be.

It's so much more pain than whatever bad feeling you, white Chicagoan, have about the violence. It's so much more broken than you can even imagine, even though you might have tried. It's the worst, brokenest pain you can't imagine, and even though Kotlowitz tries, you know that you are never going to be able to imagine it, no matter what. And this is your fucking city, your fucking beloved city.

How can you live here? You wonder. And how can you not? You also wonder. How can you love it so, when it is so broken? There are no answers here, you think. You love it because you do. It is broken because people who look like you broke it on purpose, years ago, and no one with any real power wants to admit that or fix it.

There are no answers here. Five years after the events in this book took place, there are no answers. There is the death, and the broken places, and they go on and on and on. Like the city. Like your love for it.