Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} An American Summer Love and Death in Chicago by Alex Kotlowitz Alex Kotlowitz. Also honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for his books which “illuminate astonishing national inequities through the lens of individual experience.” Named a Best Book of the Year by: NPR * The Washington Post * The Economist * The Dallas Morning News * The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal * Kirkus Reviews * The National Book Review. Co-winner of the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice. Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. Alex Kotlowitz. For forty years, Alex Kotlowitz has been telling stories from the heart of America, deeply intimate tales of struggle and perseverance. He is the author of four books, including his most recent, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago which received the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize . His other books include the national bestseller There Are No Children Here , which the New York Public Library selected as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. It received the Helen B. Bernstein Award and was adapted as a television movie produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. It was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year along with his second book, The Other Side of the River which also received The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Nonfiction. His book on Chicago, Never a City So Real , was recently released in paperback. While Alex’s home is print, he has also worked in film and radio. His documentary, The Interrupters , a collaboration with Steve James, premiered at Sundance in January 2011 and aired as a two-hour special on PBS’s FRONTLINE. It was cited as one of the best films of the year by The New Yorker, The Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly and The LA Times. For the film, Alex received an Emmy, a Cinema Eye Award and an Independent Spirit Award. A former staff writer at The Wall Street Journal , Alex’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and on This American Life. His stories, which one reviewer wrote “inform the heart”, have also appeared in Granta , Rolling Stone , The Chicago Tribune , Slate and The Washington Post , as well as on PBS ( Frontline , the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and Media Matters ) and on NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition . His play, An Unobstructed View, written with Amy Drozdowska, premiered in Chicago in June 2005. In 2016, Alex worked with inmates at Illinois’ Stateville prison on essays about their cells. The stories which ran on The New Yorker’s website and on The New Yorker’s Radio Hour became the basis for the podcast Written Inside. NPR’s Lauren Ober, who picked it as one of the top ten podcasts of the year, wrote: “It’s an intimate look at life behind bars that will likely change the way you think about incarceration.” Alex has been honored in all three mediums, including two Peabodys, two Columbia duPonts, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the George Polk Award. He’s the recipient of eight honorary degrees, the John LaFarge Memorial Award for Interracial Justice given by New York’s Catholic Interracial Council and the 2019 Harold Washington Literary Award. He also received the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters for his books which “illuminate astonishing national inequities through the lens of individual experience.” Alex regularly gives lectures and talks around the country. He’s been a writer-in-residence at the University of Chicago, a visiting professor for seven years at the University of Notre Dame, a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College and a Distinguished Visitor at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He’s a professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism where he’s been teaching since 1999. Alex grew up in New York City and attended Wesleyan University. After a year-long stint on a cattle ranch, he took his first journalism job at a small alternative weekly in Lansing, Michigan. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Maria Woltjen, who directs the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. They have two children, Mattie and Lucas. An American Summer : Love and Death in Chicago. The numbers are staggering: over the past twenty years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire. What does that do to the spirit of individuals and community? Drawing on his decades of experience, Alex Kotlowitz set out to chronicle one summer in the city, writing about individuals who have emerged from the violence and whose stories capture the capacity--and the breaking point--of the human heart and soul. The result is a spellbinding collection of deeply intimate profiles that upend what we think we know about gun violence in America. Among others, we meet a man who as a teenager killed a rival gang member and twenty years later is still trying to come to terms with what he's done; a devoted school social worker struggling with her favorite student, who refuses to give evidence in the shooting death of his best friend; the witness to a wrongful police shooting who can't shake what he has seen; and an aging former gang leader who builds a place of refuge for himself and his friends. Applying the close-up, empathic reporting that made There Are No Children Here a modern classic, Kotlowitz offers a piercingly honest portrait of a city in turmoil. These sketches of those left standing will get into your bones. This one summer will stay with you. Отзывы - Написать отзыв. Оценки читателей. LibraryThing Review. Well, what do you want to hear first? How well crafted this book is as word craft, or how perfectly this captures big city life for American- Americans while painting a vivid picture of a constant . Читать весь отзыв. LibraryThing Review. An in depth look at the tragedy caused by gun violence every day on the mean streets of Chicago. The author chose one Summer about four years ago and delves into the stories of victims and their . Читать весь отзыв. Alex Kotlowitz. “ An American Summer is an archive of the war—like finding a shocking but beautiful bundle of letters and photographs in the attic. Except that these dispatches reflect the daily violence that many Americans are experiencing, right now, in too many of our cities. Alex Kotlowitz dispenses with wooden categories of criminal and victim. With his uncommon warmth and sensitivity, he makes us understand that violence doesn’t happen in a moment; it’s a state of affairs.” — Sarah Koenig, creator and host of Serial. “This book is revelatory and brilliant. There Are No Children Here changed me when I read it years ago. An American Summer has done it again.” — Wes Moore, author of the bestseller The Other Wes Moore. “What remains after the deaths, the funerals, the court hearings, the jail sentences, the mourning? This is the question at the heart of Alex Kotlowitz's compassionate and unflinching new book, and what emerges speaks to a stubborn, immovable, singular drive towards hope and forgiveness. Kotlowitz reminds us again and again that what happens in Chicago reflects the best and worst of our nation. This spectacular book is an urgent call to bear witness, not to the dying that violence breeds, but to the love that stands tall amidst the debris.” — Maaza Mengiste, author of Beneath the Lion's Gaze. Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award. Selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century Helen Bernstein Award, Carl Sandburg Award, Christopher Award A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. “A triumph of empathy.” — Los Angeles Times. “Alex Kotlowitz joins the ranks of the important few writers on the subject of urban poverty.” — Chicago Tribune. “An extraordinary glimpse into the lives of those struggling for survival and dignity in inner-city America.” — Chicago Sun-Times. “Alex Kotlowitz’s story informs the heart. His meticulous portrait of the two boys in a Chicago housing project shows how much heroism is required to survive, let alone escape.” — New York Times. “Amid the darkness and ever-present despair, Kotlowitz beautifully captures the moments of brightness and hope. Easily could become the 1990s equivalent of Michael Harrington’s The Other America .” — San Francisco Chronicle. Chicago Tribune’ s Heartland Prize for Nonfiction Great Lakes Booksellers Award A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. “Kotlowitz writes with absolutely perfect pitch … his masterly investigation ultimately reveals the tragedy of racial stereotypes.” — Christian Science Monitor. “A vivid American microcosm, a telling tableau of the way we are….Alex Kotlowitz’s nuanced and absorbing account of the mysterious death of a young black man in southwestern Michigan … (is) important, essential even, for the rest of us to contemplate.” — The New York Times. “A densely realistic, humane portrait.” — The New Yorker. “A patient and sensitive portrait of the social life of race in America…the mystery is engrossing.” — The Nation. “ A riveting portrait of a racially troubled America” — Publishers Weekly (starred) Coming out in paperback, June 2019. “… a fine successor to Nelson Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make as a song to our rough-and-tumble, broken-nosed city…” — Chicago Sun- Times. “Kotlowitz is an omnivorous observer, discerning listener, and unassuming witness to urban life…[ Never a City So Real is] clear-eyed testimony to his great affection for this no-nonsense city and his infinite fascination with humankind.” — Booklist. “Kotlowitz uses his immense skill for capturing stories of those who are often overlooked to paint a compelling portrait of one of America’s iconic capitals.” — O Magazine. 'An American Summer' Presents The Human Side Of Gun Violence In Chicago. In An American Summer , the reader is asked to ponder this: "In a good year in Chicago, roughly 2,000 people get wounded by gun fire, or five people a day, give or take. Some years the number has risen to over 4,000, or roughly one person every two hours." Writer and filmmaker Alex Kotlowitz knows this. He has written about Chicago for most of his career. His book There Are No Children Here , which chronicles the lives of two boys struggling to survive in Chicago's Henry Horner Homes public housing complex, was named one of the 150 most import important books of the 20th century by the New York Public Library. In An American Summer , his latest book, Kotlowitz revisits the brutal, blood-soaked streets of Chicago and digs into the lives of those touched by violence, both as victims and culprits. In the last two decades, he notes, 14,033 people have been killed and about 60,000 have been wounded by gunfire in Chicago. This level of violence stems from a combination of gang and drug activity, housing complexes that segregate less fortunate people from the more affluent parts of the city, and easy access to guns. However, while it is easy to identify the elements that create it, the impact of that gun violence spreads through society rhizomatically, affecting people and communities alike in a variety of ways. Kotlowitz spent the summer of 2013 researching how gun violence shapes the city. An American Summer is the result of that; a reporting mosaic that brings together the stories he encountered that summer. It is a painful chronicle about an extremely violent city based on the narratives of those who managed to survive its streets. Author Interviews. Beyond The Numbers, Living Through Chicago's Gun Violence In 'American Summer' Beyond The Numbers, Living Through Chicago's Gun Violence In 'American Summer' The main characters in this book are diverse. There is a man who was a gang member for years and still struggles to cope with his actions; a mother who refuses to hate her son's killer and battles to make people understand individuals are more than their worst acts; a social worker dealing with a student who refuses to give information about the death of his best friend; and a reporter who lives, and tweets, the constant onslaught of shootings in Chicago. Some victims learn to move on and some turn into activists, thus breaking the cycle. Unfortunately, others are unable to let go. This last group contributes to perpetuating violence. What happens to them changes them for the worse. It becomes a wound that "festers; the desire for vengeance and payback burns until it eventually erupts." Kotlowitz talked to a lot of people while reporting, and he developed a nuanced understanding of how police work to solve the problem. He reports on the tactics employed by the police to keep the situation under control: "Extra overtime so they can put more police on the streets. Using data to identify hot spots where they can send more police. Using algorithms to identify the four hundred young men they believe most likely to shoot someone or get shot." However, despite these tactics, the shootings continue, and they do so at a pace that overwhelms the system: "In Chicago, the vast majority of murders and shootings go unsolved. Murder someone, and chances are only one in four that you'll get caught. Shoot someone and injure them, it's only a one in ten possibility that you'll get charged. That's not a misprint. You have an awfully good chance of shooting someone in the city and getting away with it." 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, which Kotlowitz says is symbolic of "where social workers fit into the hierarchy of our schools." 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.