The New York Times Book Review - Jennifer Gonnerman
This is a world that most journalists never cover, and most of America never sees…In Ghettoside, [Leovy] tackles this "plague of murders," as she calls it, with a book-length narrative that enables her to write about it with all the context and complexity it deserves…Leovy's relentless reporting has produced a book packed with valuable, hard-won insights—and it serves as a crucial, 366-page reminder that "black lives matter," showing how the "system's failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap."
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
Jill Leovy's powerful new book…is old-school narrative journalism…a serious and kaleidoscopic achievement…Nestled inside the story of one gang-related killing is a well-made and timely argument…that transcends a single death. Ms. Leovy suggests, six decades after the start of the civil rights movement, that the "impunity for the murder of black men" remains America's great and largely ignored race problem…Like an orchestra, Ghettoside needs time to warm up…Yet once it gets rolling, it is tidal in its force…Ms. Leovy's greatest gift as a journalist [is] her ability to remain hard-headed while displaying an almost Tolstoyan level of human sympathy. Nearly every person in her story—killers and victims, hookers and soccer moms, good cops and bad—exists within a rich social context…[Leovy's] a crisp writer with a crisp mind and the ability to boil entire skies of information into hard journalistic rain.
From the Publisher
A serious and kaleidoscopic achievement . . . [Jill Leovy is] a crisp writer with a crisp mind and the ability to boil entire skies of information into hard journalistic rain.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Masterful . . . gritty reporting that matches the police work behind it.”—Los Angeles Times
“Moving and engrossing.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Penetrating and heartbreaking . . . Ghettoside points out how relatively little America has cared even as recently as the last decade about the value of young black men’s lives.”—USA Today
“Functions both as a snappy police procedural and—more significantly—as a searing indictment of legal neglect . . . Leovy’s powerful testimony demands respectful attention.”—The Boston Globe
“Ghettoside is fantastic. It does what the best narrative nonfiction does: It transcends its subject by taking one person’s journey and making it all our journeys. That’s what makes this not just a gritty, heart-wrenching, and telling book, but an important one. From the patrol cop to the president, everyone needs to read this book.”—Michael Connelly
“Ghettoside is remarkable: a deep anatomy of lawlessness.”—Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
“[Leovy writes] with grace and artistry, and controlled—but bone-deep—outrage in her new book. . . . Ghettoside, if there’s any justice, will be the most important book about urban violence in a generation.”—David M. Kennedy, The Washington Post
“Riveting . . . This timely book could not be more important.”—Associated Press
“Told with the chilling detail and gripping pace of a prime-time drama.”—The Economist
“Leovy’s relentless reporting has produced a book packed with valuable, hard-won insights—and it serves as a crucial, 366-page reminder that ‘black lives matter.’ ”—The New York Times Book Review
“A compelling analysis of the factors behind the epidemic of black-on-black homicide, and the beginnings of a policy prescription for tackling it . . . an important book, which deserves a wide audience.”—Hari Kunzru, The Guardian
“Ghettoside has many successes: its complicated portrait of the LAPD, the humanity it lends to the families of murder victims, and its ability to engage readers from a historical and current-day context (the sundry facts Leovy provides throughout the book never overwhelm).”—Jason Parham, Gawker
“A brave book . . . It is not often that I pick up a work of non-fiction and picture the movie unfolding before my eyes. . . . [Ghettoside] offers a calm dissection of America’s oldest epidemic. . . . [Leovy’s] knowledge makes for lapidary prose that crackles with insight. It is also deeply humane.”—Financial Times
“First-rate stuff.”—Newsweek
Kirkus Reviews
2014-11-06
Los Angeles Times reporter and editor Leovy looks at the thinly veiled racist origins of violence in South Central LA.In her debut, the author journeys where most fear to tread: the perennially mean streets of South Central LA, where she uses the senseless murder of a policeman's progeny as a jumping-off point to investigate broader issues of why, even as violent crime as a whole in America continues to drop, that urban area sees so many of its people dying by tragically violent means. Leovy's big-picture thesis is that whether you're talking about the "rough justice" of vigilante revenge killings in Ghana, Northern Ireland or South Central LA, the one underlying cause is the same: a vacuum left by a legal system that fails to serve everyone equally. Leovy posits that the gang violence in LA is the result of the local police simply not doing their jobs. On a microcosmic level, the author follows the lives of two LAPD officers, John Skaggs and Wally Tennelle, the former investigating the murder of the latter's son. Tennelle's decision to buck the trend among LA cops and live within the city limits furthered his career as a police officer but had deadly consequences for his son. Intertwined with Leovy's swiftly paced true-crime narrative involving Skaggs' methodical tracking down of Tennelle's killer is some probing sociological research into how blacks in LA got the short end of the socioeconomic straw: Hispanics may have been treated unfairly in the jobs they worked, but as Leovy points out, African-Americans were, even as far back as the 1920s, often excluded from even the lowest-skilled jobs in the city. Unfortunately, however deftly the author interweaves the more personal angle of officers Skaggs and Tennelle with broader sociological "root cause" investigations, there is little to suggest that real change will arrive soon in South Central LA. A sobering and informative look at the realities of criminality in the inner city.
