This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. After mass shootings, like the ones at Newtown and Parkland, we ask, how can this happen? How do we carry on in the aftermath of such violence? My guest, journalist Alex Kotlowitz, says those are the right questions, but we don't ask the same questions when it comes to the children and teenagers in our city's poorest and most violent neighborhoods, like Chicago's South and West Sides, who are watching their friends and family members get shot. Kotlowitz tells some of their stories in his new book, "An American Summer: Love And Death In Chicago."
The summer he writes about is 2013. He interviewed people who survived shootings. He interviewed the loved ones of people who didn't survive and people who confessed to taking another person's life. Kotlowitz says he also attended bond hearings and trials, hung out on street corners, attended funerals and vigils, visited people in prison, showed up at crime scenes and embedded with a homicide unit.
Kotlowitz wrote the 1991 book, "There Are No Children Here," which followed the lives of two boys, brothers growing up in one of Chicago's housing projects. One of those boys, Pharaoh, later lived with Kotlowitz for six years. Four of the kids Kotlowitz befriended while writing that book have been murdered. Kotlowitz was one of the producers of the documentary, "The Interrupters," about a group of men and women in Chicago who try to show up on the scene and stop gang violence before it erupts.
[For more on this story by TERRY GROSS, go to https://www.npr.org/2019/03/05...ts-in-people-s-bones]
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