Author: Jill Leovy
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Genres/categories:
Non Fiction, Award winners, History, Politics, True crime
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ISBNs:
9780385529983
0385529988 |
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On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes.
But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift.
Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly ignored, American murder - a "ghettoside" killing, one young black man slaying another - and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs.
is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in our cities - and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped.
"
is fantastic. It does what the best narrative nonfiction does: It transcends its subject by taking one person's journey and making it all our journeys. That's what makes this not just a gritty, heart-wrenching, and telling book, but an important one. From the patrol cop to the president, everyone needs to read this book."
"Jill Leovy writes with exceptional sharpness and tautness, and her pages glow and glitter with the found poetry of the street. This book will take an honored place on the shelf that includes David Simon's classic
and Michelle Alexander's explosive study of mass incarceration,
."
"A gripping and powerful account of urban homicide investigation in the United States."
"Unmissable . . . I'm astonished by Jill Leovy's forthcoming
. Police and race in America are examined with forensic skill and furious, exceptional prose. Lucid, revelatory, superbly written, incredibly timely. A book of the year."
"
is a brilliant taxonomic investigation into the American violence epidemic disguised as a highly entertaining true crime book."
"A thoroughly engrossing true-life policier full of vivid and sympathetic characters, but also the bravest book about race and crime I've ever read."
"What an amazing book - a totally gripping piece of reporting."
"Absorbing . . . Readers may come for Leovy's detective story; they will stay for her lucid social critique.
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