Chicago is one of America’s most iconic, historic, and fascinating cities. For Alex Kotlowitz, an accidental Chicagoan, it is the perfect perch from which to peer into America’s heart.
“The best $16 you’ll spend all summer will be on Never a City So Real…It’s a fine successor to Nelson Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make as a song to our rough-and-tumble, broken-nosed city…”
Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times
Separated by a river, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor are two Michigan towns that are geographically close, yet worlds apart. St. Joseph is a prosperous, predominately white lakeshore community while Benton Harbor is impoverished and predominately black. When the body of Eric McGinnis, a black teenage boy from Benton Harbor, is found in the river that separates the towns, relations between the two communities grow increasingly strained as longheld misperceptions and attitudes surface.
“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
There Are No Children Here chronicles two years in the lives of two boys, Lafeyette and Pharoah, struggling to survive in Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex disfigured by crime and neglect.
“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
Alex Kotlowitz is perhaps best known for his national bestseller, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, which the New York Public Library selected as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. Alex’s nonfiction stories, which one critic wrote “inform the heart”, have appeared in print, radio and film. From his documentary, The Interrupters, to his stories in The New York Times Magazine and on public radio’s This American Life, he’s been honored in all three mediums.
