The B&n Podcast

Alex Kotlowitz has made a career out of mapping the lives of those who live in what he has called "the other America," in works like his award-winning 1992 bestseller There Are No Children Here, his documentary film The interrupters, and his wide-ranging reporting for newspapers, magazines and radio.  His revelatory, heartbreaking new book An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago takes up the problem of gun violence with a portrait of a single city over the course of one murder-wracked season.  It probes the nature of the crisis where it tears most persistently into the lives of ordinary Americans placed by poverty and racism into a daily struggle with the aftermath of violence and the fear of more to come. But An American Summer is a tapestry of story – a work about the Chicagoans who opened up their lives and hearts to Kotlowitz; the result is a powerful evocation of grief and endurance, love and loss.  We caught the author in New York, just as An American Summer was being released. He sat down in th