Kotlowitz writes with masterful economy and concreteness, and from his meticulous narrative springs a rich spectrum of emotions like light reflecting off high-rise window ... Kotlowitz’s hard-hitting and powerfully clarifying dispatches bring into the light people who love their families and friends and who work hard to take care of others, yet who are undermined, betrayed, and brutalized by violence, racism, poverty, and an unconscionable lack of understanding, caring, resources, and social and political will.
Like Kotlowitz’s now classic 1991 book, There Are No Children Here, about two boys growing up in a Chicago housing project, An American Summer forgoes analysis and instead probes the human damage that stems from exposure to violence. What he finds is important ... Kotlowitz, however, depicts the question of what causes urban crime to rise and fall as essentially unanswerable. 'Anyone who tells you they know is lying.' This is a curious position, especially given the trend (hardly mentioned in An American Summer) that criminologists consider the most important fact about urban violence in recent decades: Most American cities have experienced far less of it than anyone predicted, and national experts feel more confident than ever about what works ... President Trump, who called Chicago a 'war zone' and threatened to send in the National Guard, and Spike Lee, who named his 2015 film Chi-Raq, have helped make Chicago the national symbol of murderous violence. Kotlowitz, despite good intentions, has reinforced this view ... An American Summer is a powerful indictment of a city and a nation that have failed to protect their most vulnerable residents, or to register the depth of their pain. It is also a case study in the constraints of a purely narrative approach to the problems of inequality and social suffering.
An American Summer isn't a classic research narrative. It doesn't have copious footnotes. It doesn't include a bibliography at the end. Instead, Kotlowitz presents the human side of tragedy, the stories of those left behind. He paints an honest picture of the constant tug-of-war between families, communities, and schools on one side and the streets on the other. He gives readers an unflinching look at the lives of grieving mothers — and of social workers with too much on their plates who work stuffed in windowless cinder-block rooms the size of walk-in closets ... This makes An American Summer an uncomfortable read that cuts to the marrow of one of country's most violent cities and exposes the inequities, economic factors, and psycho-geographic elements that make it what it is ... There are no answers in these pages, but sometimes getting a good look at something is the first step in finding a solution.
... a tough book to keep reading, an uncomfortable and relentless close-up, chapter after chapter documenting the social havoc and personal suffering leading to teens and children being murdered or committing murder, almost all by gunshot, through three summer months of 2013 ... Kotlowitz... is a brilliant reporter who covers one of America's most heartbreaking beats. Readers know this author walks the walk. If his new book is disconcerting to read, it's also hard to look away from. Kotlowitz's accounts of love, friendship, parenting, rivalry, humiliation and the pressure to maintain respect are fascinatingly real ... Writers trade off as they compose, between enchanting readers and specifying complexity. Alex Kotlowitz has written daringly, accomplishing both, and readers who join his harrowing journey surely will emerge with deeper and kinder understandings, and perhaps feel morally implicated by their understanding of the grim realities his summer tour shows us.
...another addition to his remarkable work charting the stories of the Windy City ... Kotlowitz has an uncanny rapport with all his subjects, sitting down with them for months or years, learning about their struggles from friends and family and creating a compelling, incredibly readable depiction of their lives. There is pain, death and deep sadness throughout these pages, but also love, forgiveness and new beginnings. Kotlowitz presents life as it is for those living in Chicago: the chaos, tragedy and connections that give life meaning and hope.
Some of Kotlowitz’s incidental observations, about realities so extreme they border on the absurd, are the most telling of all ... Even amid the grimness, there are sweet moments ... Still, the book’s dominant mood is bleakness. Kotlowitz wisely does not propose solutions to Chicago’s ills ... One thing he does achieve is to make clear that these horrors are not happening on TV or to creatures who somehow don’t feel pain. They are happening here, in the most prosperous nation in the world, to people like me and you.
Mr Kotlowitz is a sympathetic, fluent writer. He is not one for policy prescriptions, but the accumulating accounts of suffering serve to condemn the city for letting the violence drag on ... The shifting nature of violence is also troubling. Mr Kotlowitz picks out two trends.
... gut-wrenching and heartbreaking ... Kotlowitz listens [to many peoples' stories] with compassion to dozens of affected people, bringing them alive in fluid prose ... Kotlowitz can't resolve [certain arguments]. But his book makes these abstract questions personal.
... far from a glum book about abject lives. Survivors form mutual support groups – 'they live richly in mourning' – and those who have inflicted violence turn their lives around. But their stories resist narratives of closure and redemption ... At bottom, American Summer is about American exceptionalism, but not the kind spoken of by that son of Chicago’s privileged northern suburbs, Donald Rumsfeld. Instead, it’s a story of near-hermetic racial segregation and permissive gun laws. The latter erupts into public consciousness with mass shootings, but Englewood and its like, burying scores of their youth each year, bear the daily price, Kotlowitz notes. Strewing these pages: acts of impulsiveness and bravado by young men 'for whom a sense of future feels as distant and arbitrary as a meteor shower,' rendered lethal by the admixture of easily-acquired firearms.
Kotlowitz offers a narrative that is as messy and complicated and heart-wrenching as life itself: 'This is a book, I suppose, about that silence—and the screams and howling and prayers and longing that it hides.' A fiercely uncompromising—and unforgettable—portrait.
Kotlowitz has a ruminative, almost poetic sensibility...The violence is made palpable but never romanticized. Kotlowitz’s approach is empathetic in this a bold, unflinching depiction of an ever-lengthening crisis.
