Stories from the carnage

Alex Kotlowitz is an American journalist, author, and filmmaker, a writer-in-residence at Northwestern University. His book There Are No Children Here was a national bestseller and was named one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century by The New York Public Library. It is the true story of brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 11 and 9 trying to make it in a violence-ridden public housing project. The boys live in a gang-plagued war zone on Chicago's West Side. "If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver," says Lafeyette at one point. That's if, not when. The book's title comes from a comment made by the brothers' mother: "There are no children here. They've seen too much to be children."

Kotlowitz has now published An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago. In the introduction he writes, "Since the publication of [There Are No Children Here] in 1991, four of the kids I befriended have been murdered . . . The numbers are staggering. In Chicago, in the twenty years between 1990 and 2010, 14,033 people were killed, another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire. And the vast majority of these shootings took place in a very concentrated part of the city."

He decided to report on events in that very concentrated part of the city—the black and Hispanic part—over the course of a single summer, 2013. He wanted to write "a set of dispatches, sketches of those left standing, of those emerging from the rubble, of those trying to make sense of what they've left behind." There was nothing special about the summer of 2013 (and to provide context and conclusion to some of the stories, he occasionally has to go back and forward in time).  During those three months, "172 people were killed, another 793 wounded by gunfire. By Chicago standards it was a tamer season than most."

The stories are horrific, depressing, inspiring. We meet a man who as a teenager killed a rival gang member and who, twenty years later, is still trying to come to terms with what he did. We travel with a devoted school social worker who struggles with her favorite student who refuses to give evidence in the shooting death of his best friend. We spend time with a witness to a wrongful police shooting who cannot stop thinking about
what he has seen. We visit an aging former gang leader who has built a place of refuge for himself and his friends.

Kotlowitz evokes a society in which it is all against all. The most depressing story is that of Ramaine Hill who had been the victim of a shooting by a fifteen-year-old on a bicycle. Ramaine identified the shooter who was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Then for two years the shooter's friends tried to get Ramaine to recant, threatening him, offering money, even attempting to kidnap him. Then "a man in a red hoodie and red jogging pants, with a distinctive limp" shot and killed Ramaine. It happened at 1:30 in the afternoon on a Saturday in a public park. The police identified four witnesses. The police identified the shooter, but without witness testimony the prosecution had no case. Not one would testify. And given Ramaine's experience who would?

An American Summer is a description, not a prescription. "It's not a policy map or a critique," he writes. "It's not about what works and doesn't work. Anyone who tells you they know is lying . . . Antiviolence gurus insist they have the answers. I've seen one—the founder of a local program—take credit for the reduction of shootings in the years before his organization even existed. What works? After twenty years of funerals and hospital visits, I don't feel like I'm much closer to knowing."

So what you have in An American Summer in an incredibly well-reported and powerfully-written account of certain American lives in a certain American place at a certain time. It's an unforgettable account.