Summary
Winner of the 2017 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Shortlisted for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Foundation Award Finalist for the 2017 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism Longlisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non Fiction
On an average day in America, seven children and teens will be shot dead. In Another Day in the Death of America , award-winning journalist Gary Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during one such day. It could have been any day, but he chose November 23, 2013. Black, white, and Latino, aged nine to nineteen, they fell at sleepovers, on street corners, in stairwells, and on their own doorsteps. From the rural Midwest to the barrios of Texas, the narrative crisscrosses the country over a period of twenty-four hours to reveal the full human stories behind the gun-violence statistics and the brief mentions in local papers of lives lost.
This powerful and moving work puts a human face-a child's face-on the "collateral damage" of gun deaths across the country. This is not a book about gun control, but about what happens in a country where it does not exist. What emerges in these pages is a searing and urgent portrait of youth, family, and firearms in America today.
Author Notes
Gary Younge , an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute, is an award-winning columnist for the Guardian and Nation and an acclaimed author. In 2009 he won the British James Cameron award for his coverage of the 2008 presidential election, and in 2015 he won the Foreign Commentator of the Year Award. In 2023 he won the Orwell Prize for Journalism. His most recent book is The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream .
His previous books include Who Are We - and Should it Matter in the Twenty-First Century? , Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States , and No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey through the American South . Formerly the Belle Zeller Visiting Professor of public policy and social administration at Brooklyn College, CUNY, he has two honorary degrees from British universities.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Guardian journalist Younge (The Speech) chronicles the shooting deaths of 10 children and teens on a random Saturday in 2013 to illustrate the capriciousness of gun violence in America. The circumstances vary: one child is a victim of a domestic dispute; two were shot by friends playing with firearms; one was a known gang leader. While one shooting "tore at the very fabric of [a] tight-knit community," another elicited only an 81-word mention in the newspaper. Younge explores each incident in terms of its location, from the San Jose, Calif., enclave of the Nuestra Familia gang to rural Marlette, Mich., where hunting is popular. He discusses the flawed gun control narratives that require the "elevation and canonization of 'the worthy victim'" to engage the public's sympathy, and critiques the NRA's lobbying practices as corrupt. He further castigates the entrenched racism and poverty that keep young African-Americans mired in a cycle of violence. Drawing from insights from community organizers and scholarship on violence, economics, and psychology, Younge provides nuance and context to a polarizing issue. The personal touches, however, are most affecting, as Younge pieces together each story from news reports and interviews with friends and family, weaving a tragic narrative of wasted potential. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown Ltd. (U.K.). (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Gun control remains one of the most polarizing topics in America. To give a human face to the issue, Younge, editor-at-large for The Guardian, investigates the stories of 10 people who died by gunshot on a random day November 23, 2013. To drive the point further, the victims were all working-class or poor people under the age of 19. Readers learn that Jaiden Dixen of Grove City, Ohio, age 9, was killed when he opened the door to his mother's sociopathic ex-boyfriend; teenager Kenneth Mills-Tucker of Indianapolis was in the wrong place at the wrong time when automatic gunfire broke out; 11-year-old Tyler Dunn of Marlette, Michigan, was shot by a friend playing with a hunting rifle he thought was unloaded. Woven into these portraits are stories of Younge attending an NRA convention, researching gun statistics across the world, and discussing related social topics such as poverty, gangs, and crime. In his afterword, Younge states that researching and writing this book has made me want to scream. Most readers will feel that way reading it, as there are no easy fixes here.--Vnuk, Rebecca Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EVERYTHING UNDER THE HEAVENS: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power, by Howard W. French. (Vintage, $17.) French, a former New York Times and Washington Post journalist, envisions a Chinadriven world, in which the superpower will try to recover from past humiliations. His account includes maps that show how China views the world, and considers how China's rivals should respond to its bid for dominance. NIGHT OF FIRE, by Colin Thubron. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) A house is burning in Britain, and the fire kills all its inhabitants - among them a neurosurgeon, a priest and a photographer. The tenants share overlapping details, including themes and figures that recur across their lives. Taken together, their stories offer a meditation on collective memory, universal history and the role of society's outsiders. TESTOSTERONE REX: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society, by Cordelia Fine. (Norton, $15.95.) Fine gleefully dismantles preconceived ideas about the sexes, offering a history of how such stereotypes evolved, and questions why we get so much about gender wrong. (No, women aren't more cautious than men, and men aren't more status-obsessed than women.) Put simply: Biological sex, she writes, does not create "two kinds of people." SIX FOUR, by Hideo Yokoyama. Translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies. (Picador, $18.) An unresolved kidnapping is still the shame of a Japanese police department 14 years later. Yoshinobu Mikami, a former detective now working in media relations for the department, is drawn into the case amid a push to put it to rest, and is grappling with the disappearance of his own daughter when he notices aberrations in the cold investigation. The novel, the first of Yokoyama's to be translated into English, was a best seller in Japan. ANOTHER DAY IN THE DEATH OF AMERICA: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives, by Gary Younge. (Nation Books, $15.99.) Younge reports out the lives and deaths of the 10 children and teenagers who were killed Saturday, Nov. 23, 2013. As a Briton who spent over a decade in the United States, he offers a valuable perspective: "I had skin in the game," he writes. "Black skin in a game where the odds were stacked against it." WOMAN NO. 17, by Edan Lepucki. (Hogarth, $16.) In her second novel, Lepucki examines motherhood, identity and art. In Hollywood Hills, Lady is searching for a babysitter to care for her children while she finishes her memoir, about raising a teenager who does not speak. When Esther arrives for an interview, Lady is charmed and hires her on the spot, but Esther's behavior is a performance, with a shocking twist.
Kirkus Review
The tragic stories of 10 kids killed by gunfire. In this heartrending, beautifully crafted book, Guardian editor-at-large Younge (The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s Dream, 2013, etc.) explores the least-known but most common form of American gun violence involving children and teenagersnot mass school shootings but single, isolated killings, an average of seven daily, in neighborhoods across the country. For 18 months, he investigated the lives of victims between the ages of 9 and 19 who were shot dead on an arbitrarily selected date (Nov. 23, 2013) in varying circumstances: while opening a door, from a passing car, while walking home at 1 a.m. from a McDonalds, while playing with a gun with a friend. The victims are all poor, working-class males (seven black, two Hispanic, one white) who made poor decisions in a brutalizing, unforgiving environment. In Younges empathetic telling, they are seen as vulnerable children, some innocent, some not so, all loved by their families. The victims include Tyshon Anderson, 18, a Chicago gang member; Samuel Brightmon, 16, a trusting black kid caught in random gunfire in Dallas; Edwin Rajo, 16, an impulsive Honduran whose girlfriend did not realize there was a bullet in the guns chamber; and Tyler Dunn, 11, slain accidentally during rural Michigans hunting season. The author discusses such factors as the availability of guns, the challenges of parenting in poor neighborhoods, and the development of adolescent brains. When it comes to protecting children around guns, parents are flawed and laws are clearly inadequate, he writes. Younge says fear of gun violence in impoverished areas is such that one mother was happy her 14-year-old son was locked upit was safer for him to be incarcerated than to live in the neighborhood. Important, deeply affecting, and certain to alarm readers who care about the lives of children in a gun-ridden society. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
During 24 hours in November 2013, ten people ages nine to 19 were shot and killed, not counting any suicides, which Younge (No Place Like Home) indicates were little reported. All boys, the youth include two murdered by friends playing with guns, one by the father of his half brother, and some whose attackers and motives are unknown. A British journalist of Barbadian descent who lived in the United States for 12 years, Younge brings a clear-eyed perspective to this fraught topic. He mourns and is angry but tempers his emotional response, judiciously and compellingly sharing pertinent realities, including the ubiquity of recognition by black parents that their child might die and an injustice known to families of color: the perceived moral character of a victim affects the public assessment of the "wrongness" of the killing. Younge also corrects misperceptions of black culture that inform the dangerous idea that the black community is rife with unfit parents and that "black-on-black" crime is a special category. VERDICT A heartrending compendium of the lives of American children taken by guns on an average day. Gripping and eloquent yet challenging in the brutality of its subject, this important book calls for empathy and should be widely read. A film adaptation starring David Oyelowo is in development.-Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.