I become embarrassed when I think back to my attempts at emotion as a young writer—don't get me wrong, an unusual number of my attempts were actually good and they worked (I'm professionally paid to write stuff that makes people cry, you know.) But you do certain things in your youth, like temper the police killing of a well-respected non-gang member with scenes of children literally chasing a rainbow down Chicago streets, things you wouldn't do when you're older and you perhaps realize that one can easily smother their own emotional seedlings simply by working the soil a little too hard. A review said this was the better of his two books on Chicago inner city life, but I disagree. In fact, I think Hoop Dreams, the movie which covers similar territory, is better than this book, a book that's fascinating though naggingly facile (as opposed to engagingly real.) You know, like a middling This American Life story. I'd go read "An American Summer." Three stars.

Two things alarmed me recently. One was hearing a Radiolab producer say that they never once aired a story that didn't have some sort of positive ending. The other was when I noticed how obsessed YouTube reviewers are with "character development". Alarming because that means people's idea of what the "golden rule" story consists of is becoming narrowed and calcified, which means a lot of stories that do not fit that idea do not get told. So it's downright shocking to read a nonfiction book full of stories that don't end well, that have no justice, where characters don't grow, where those that try to grow can't, where moral behavior is not rewarded, where immoral behavior is not punished, and where people's stories end more confused than where they started. Of all the books you hear tossed around anti-racism book clubs, I'm floored that this one never seems to come up. Because I would think that understanding how inner city people actually live their daily lives is far more valuable than understanding theories of systemic racism. Will you feel uplifted when the book ends? No, most certainly not. Because many stories worth telling aren't clean like that, and assigning quality to the satisfaction of character development is what unthinking, ignorant people do. Five stars.