Excerpt from An American Summer by Alex Kotlowitz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The numbers are staggering. In Chicago, in the twenty years between 1990 and 2010, 14,033 people were killed, another 63,000 wounded by gunfire. And the vast majority of these shootings took place in a very concentrated part of the city. Let me put this in some perspective, if perspective is possible; it's considerably more than the number of American soldiers killed in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. Combined. And here's the thing, Chicago is by no means the most dangerous city, not even close. Its homicide rate doesn't even put it in the top ten. But the city has become a symbol for the personal and collective wreckage caused by a kind of civil war raging in the streets of the nation's most impoverished neighborhoods. Citizens killing citizens, children killing children, police killing young black men. A carnage so long lasting, so stubborn, so persistent that it's made it virtually impossible to have a reasonable conversation about poverty in the country, and has certainly clouded any conversation about race. One friend who worked for a local anti-violence organization – the fact that such groups even exist speaks volumes to the profound depth of the problem – calls it "a madness." What's going on?

Let me tell you what this book isn't. It's not a policy map or a critique. It's not about what works and doesn't work. Anyone who tells you they know is lying. Consider that in Chicago, the police have tried community policing, SWAT teams, data to predict shooters, full saturation of troubled neighborhoods, efforts to win over gang members. And the shootings continue. Anti-violence gurus insist they have the answers. I've seen one – the founder of a local program – take credit for the reduction of shootings in the years before his organization even existed. What works? After twenty years of funerals and hospital visits, I don't feel like I'm any closer to knowing.

And so, what you have here, in these pages, is a set of dispatches, sketches of those left standing, of those emerging from the rubble, of those trying to make sense of what they've left behind. A summer in the city. 2013. There's nothing special about this particular summer other than it's the one I chose to immerse myself in. Over the course of three months, 172 people were killed, another 793 wounded by gunfire. By Chicago standards it was a tamer season than most.

Excerpted from An American Summer by Alex Kotlowitz. Copyright © 2019 by Alex Kotlowitz. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.