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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
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Masterful . . . gritty reporting that matches the police work behind it.
— Los Angeles Times
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Moving and engrossing.
— San Francisco Chronicle
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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
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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
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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
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Ghettoside is remarkable: a deep anatomy of lawlessness.
— Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
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[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
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Riveting . . . This timely book could not be more important.
— Associated Press
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Told with the chilling detail and gripping pace of a prime-time drama.
— The Economist
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Jill Leovy writes with exceptional sharpness and tautness, and her pages glow and glitter with the found poetry of the street. This book will take an honored place on the shelf that includes David Simon’s classic Homicide and Michelle Alexander’s explosive study of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow.
— Martin Amis
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A gripping and powerful account of urban homicide investigation in the United States.
— Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove
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Unmissable . . . I’m astonished by Jill Leovy’s forthcoming Ghettoside. Police and race in America are examined with forensic skill and furious, exceptional prose. Lucid, revelatory, superbly written, incredibly timely. A book of the year.
— Chris Cleave, author of Little Bee
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Ghettoside is a brilliant taxonomic investigation into the American violence epidemic disguised as a highly entertaining true crime book.
— Matt Taibbi, author of The Divide
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A thoroughly engrossing true-life policier full of vivid and sympathetic characters, but also the bravest book about race and crime I’ve ever read.
— Dan Baum, author of Nine Lives
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What an amazing book—a totally gripping piece of reporting.
— Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking
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Absorbing . . . Readers may come for Leovy’s detective story; they will stay for her lucid social critique.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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First-rate stuff.
— Newsweek
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“First-rate stuff.”
— Newsweek
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“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
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“Told with the chilling detail and gripping pace of a prime-time drama.”
— Economist
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“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.”
— New York Times
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“Masterful…gritty reporting that matches the police work behind it.”
— Los Angeles Times
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“Moving and engrossing.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
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“Functions both as a snappy police procedural and—more significantly—as a searing indictment of legal neglect…Leovy’s powerful testimony demands respectful attention.”
— Boston Globe
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“Absorbing…Readers may come for Leovy’s detective story; they will stay for her lucid social critique.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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“An unsettling view of the plague of black homicides in the US, focusing on Los Angeles County…This work of narrative
nonfiction provides stunningly up-close details.”
— Booklist
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“A sobering and
informative look at the realities of criminality in the inner city.”
— Kirkus Reviews