New Releases by Jill Leovy

En 2007, Leovy abrió un blog en el Los Angeles Times llamado Informe de Homicidios, con el objetivo de hacer una crónica de los 845 homicidios que tuvieron lugar en el condado de Los Ángeles ese año, y tratar de esclarecer las razones por las que tantas personas matan y mueren. Con un enfoque sobrio, impulsado por los datos, el polémico blog tiene el lema "Una historia para cada víctima", y en él abundan las estadísticas sobre cuestiones raciales que ponen de relieve un hecho crudo y desagradable: en 2013 los negros (el 8 por ciento de los residentes del condado) representaron el 32 por ciento de los homicidios, su tasa es siete veces superior a la de los demás grupos raciales y étnicos juntos. ¿Quién está matando a la población afroamericana? Principalmente otras personas negras, según las estadísticas, pero cabe destacar la creciente y desproporcionada violencia policial hacia esta comunidad. Muerte en el gueto es una narración trepidante, un retrato íntimo de los inspectores de policía y de una comunidad unida en la tragedia. Tras una década cubriendo el trabajo de las unidades de homicidios de la policía de Los Ángeles, Leovy presenta un trabajo pionero que nos lleva a las calles, al interior de los hogares y a la vida de una comunidad azotada por una epidemia de homicidios.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, USA TODAY, AND CHICAGO TRIBUNE • A masterly work of literary journalism about a senseless murder, a relentless detective, and the great plague of homicide in America NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • The Economist • The Globe and Mail • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes. But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift. Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly ignored, American murder—a “ghettoside” killing, one young black man slaying another—and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs. Ghettoside is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in our cities—and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped. Praise for Ghettoside “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