Press for An American Summer

The Axe Files — Interview

The Chicago Tribune — a profile

The New York Times Book Review Podcast — Interview

Chicago Magazine (a Chicagoan of the Year)

Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award

Co-winner of the Goddard Riverside Stephen Russo Book Prize for Social Justice

New York Times Book Review (cover)

“Unforgettable . . . Like Kotlowitz’s now classic ‘There Are No Children Here,’ An American Summer probes the human damage that stems from exposure to violence . . . a powerful indictment of a city and a nation that have failed to protect their most vulnerable residents, or to register their pain.”

American Academy of Arts and Letters (Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award)

“Alex Kotlowitz is a meticulous and compassionate chronicler of urban poverty and violence. Lending a respectful ear to members of his Chicago community over years and lifetimes, he tells their stories incisively and explosively. His books illuminate astonishing national inequities through the lens of individual experience.”

The Daily Beast

“An American Summer is so compelling it’s almost impossible to put down.”

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Writers trade off as they compose, between enchanting readers and specifying complexity. Alex Kotlowitz has written daringly, accomplishing both, and readers who join his harrowing journey surely will emerge with deeper and kinder understandings, and perhaps feel morally implicated by their understanding of the grim realities his summer tour shows us. Kotlowitz is a brilliant reporter who covers one of America’s most heartbreaking beats. Readers know this author walks the walk. Kotlowitz’s accounts of love, friendship, parenting, rivalry, humiliation and the pressure to maintain respect are fascinatingly real.”

NPR.ORG

“A reporting mosaic…a painful chronicle about an extremely violent city based on the narratives of those who managed to survive its streets. With this book, Kotlowitz amplifies the words of those who have witnessed [violence] and makes their experience available to readers. The experience is tremendously necessary.”

Booklist (Starred Review)

“Kotlowitz’s hard-hitting and powerfully clarifying dispatches brings into the light people who love their families and friends and who work hard to take care of others, yet who undermined and betrayed by violence, racism (and) poverty … “

The Christian Science Monitor

"Alex Kotlowitz doesn’t provide solutions to the violence that plagues Chicago. Instead, he eloquently bears witness to a single summer on its streets, chronicling a community’s ongoing struggle with murder, misery, and rage. This deeply empathetic and perceptive book isn’t easy to read. But we can only see into the neglected corners of America when someone shines a light."

The Chicago Reader

"[A] heartfelt and, at times, surprisingly hopeful portrait of a city battling intractable ills. By giving each and every person he talks to the time and respect to tell his or her story, Kotlowitz evokes fully dimensional human beings rather than the statistics or caricatures most of us are used to in reports on "bad" neighborhoods."

J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

“The triumph of AN AMERICAN SUMMER is that this familiar story is rendered with compassion and insight as well as a fresh, compelling urgency. In a series of daily dispatches, Alex Kotlowitz chronicles the summer of 2013 in vibrant, revelatory prose that captures the drama and complexity of life in the city’s toughest neighborhoods. The result is a nuanced, dispassionate portrait — a classic of immersive journalism.”

Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Kotlowitz has a ruminative, almost poetic sensisibility … (his) approach is empathetic in this a bold, unflnching depiction of an ever-lengthening crisis.”

Kirkus (Starred Review)

“Kotlowitz offers a narrative that is as messy and complicated and heart-wrenching as life itself … A fiercely uncompromising – and unforgettable – portrait.”

The Marshall Project

“It’s a testament to Kotlowitz’s skill that many of the stories he tells are surprising. All of them are gripping. There are no easy answers here, just people you can’t forget, living in a world many Americans can’t even imagine.”

The National Book Review

“These dispatches from the front lines of what is considered one of America’s most violent cities are a master class in empathy…Kotlowitz’s latest work of non-fiction describes, with poetic grace, neighborhoods like Englewood and North Lawndale, where violence is part of the fabric of everyday life, and w … Rather than write a prescriptive policy book, Kotlowitz aims to make sense of what has been lost and what it takes to emerge from the rubble. “You can’t talk about death,” he notes in this eloquent and compassionate book, “without celebrating life.”

Publishers Weekly feature

“The 14 stories in An American Summer…upend what we think we know….”