Another Day in the Death of America

24 hours. 8 states. 10 young lives lost to gun violence.

Saturday, November 23rd, 2013. It was just another day in America; an unremarkable Saturday on which ten children and teens were killed by gunfire. The youngest was nine; the oldest was nineteen. White, Black and Latino, they fell in suburbs, hamlets and ghettos. None made the national news. There was no outrage about their passing. It was just another day in the death of America, where on a daily average - seven children and teens are killed by guns.

Younge picked this day at random, searched for their families and tells their stories. The nine-year-old opened the door and was shot in the head by his mother's ex-boyfriend. The eleven-year-old was killed by his friend at a sleepover in rural Michigan. The eighteen-year-old gang member, on Chicago's South Side, was shot in a stairwell just days after being released from prison. Through ten moving chapters - one for each child - Younge explores the way these children lived and lost their short lives.

He finds out who they were, who they wanted to be, the environments they inhabited, and what this might tell us about society at large. What emerges is a searing portrait of childhood and youth in contemporary America.

About the Author

Gary Younge is an award-winning journalist for the Guardian and The Nation magazine in the US. He was posted to the US for the Guardian for 12 years before returning to London in 2015. In 2009 he won the James Cameron Award for his coverage of the Obama campaign. In 2015 he won the David Nyhan Prize for Political Journalism from Harvard's Shorenstein Center. Younge's previous books include The Speech, Who Are We?, Stranger in a Strange Land and No Place Like Home.