...a gripping account that leads the reader through places as disparate as the vast corn and soya fields of Michigan and the killing fields of Chicago ... It’s a journey through a deeply troubled America that will make its reader want to join the author in howling at the moon ... although all the victims were at the beginning of their lives, this is not a book about innocents gunned down. It is, instead, a gripping account of the conditions that turn so many of America’s powerless into victims ... what makes this book stand out is the strength of its analysis ... Younge has provided us with a beautifully told and empathic account that wrenches at the heart even as it continues to engage the brain.
...exactingly argued, fluidly written and extremely upsetting ... But Mr. Younge makes for a personable, unusual narrator. As a Briton, he brings a fresh perspective to this topic. As a father and a man of Barbadian descent, his interest in it is also personal ... What is perhaps most disheartening and eye-opening about Mr. Younge’s book is the fatalism he discovers in the communities most affected by gun violence.
One of the saddest aspects of Another Day in the Death of America is its lack of surprise ... [it] is not a book geared toward penetrating the walls of detachment and even indifference that everyday citizens build to deal (or not deal) with the violence ... Younge's anecdotal style has a measured strength ... The author's difficulty in finding and questioning relatives of the young shooting victims proves a stumbling block he can't always get past.
...a slow-burning indictment of US gun culture ... Some of the portraits suffer from the simple fact that their subjects did not have the chance to live full lives, while others are sparse given the reluctance of family members to be interviewed. But Younge elicits compelling reactions from the many relatives he speaks to ... Younge — in a book that feels both timely and utterly, hopelessly timeless — holds few illusions that there won’t be many more [deaths].
...[a] fine, sad, angry book ... The stories he uncovers have a dreadful ordinariness. They don’t speak particularly to the larger political narratives around gun violence, and Younge doesn’t twist anything to make them so ... [an] important, timely book.
Rather than parse the origins of our bloody national stalemate, British journalist Gary Younge opts to narrow his focus, and to powerful effect ... Younge writes in a calm, reportorial tone strikingly at odds with the facts being described, and uses the often searing individual stories as a jumping-off point for deep dives into related phenomena ... This might sound like someone overseasoning his subject matter with sheer variety. It's not. There's a meticulousness to Younge's approach, a gracefulness to his weave of citation and digression, and a kind of open-handed honesty in his journalistic practice that keeps the reader on track. Plus, he's a gifted writer, whose prose can rise to the nearly liturgical ... Another Day in the Death of America takes its place in the slender canon of first-rate American witness literature.
In thoughtful, evenhanded chapters stacked with footnotes, Younge works methodically to uncover the unique patterns and hypocrisies of his adopted second home. (Though British, he has an American wife and spent a dozen years reporting from the States.) Another Day doesn’t offer solutions, because it can’t; it just makes it impossible not to care.
...a sharp portrait of America, painted in blood ... Mr Younge’s determination to give a chapter to every victim, in chronological order, inevitably strains the narrative a bit. Some of the chapters are thin. But the random tragedy of the stories he encounters underlines the intractability of the problem ... his book is not so much a plea for gun control as a 'long, doleful, piercing cry' in a country so overwhelmed by gun violence that it has almost given up trying to stop it.
