Get a good book and a free hat.

Join now for $5.

We’ll make this quick.

First, enter your email. Then choose your move.

By pressing "Pick a book now" or "Pick a book later", you agree to Book of the Month’s Terms of use and Privacy policy.

Get a good book and a free hat.

Join now for $5.
undefined

You did it!

Your account is now up to date.

get the appget the app

Our app is where it’s at.

Unlock our Reading Challenge, earn prizes, and get notified of new books on our app.

Our app is where it’s at.

Unlock our Reading Challenge, earn prizes, and get notified of new books on our app.

Download on the App Store
Get it on Google Play

Already have the app? Explore here.

Ghettoside  by Jill Leovy

Nonfiction

Ghettoside

Debut

We love supporting debut authors. Congrats, Jill Leovy, on your first book!

by Jill Leovy

Excellent choice

Just enter your email to add this book to your box.

By pressing "Add to box", you agree to Book of the Month’s Terms of use and Privacy policy.

Volume 0
Volume 0

A free gift for you.

Yes, she’s embroidered.

No thanks, just checkout

Quick take

Ghettoside reads like a novel. It's meticulously paced and the writing frequently stopped me cold.

Why I love it

When offered this opportunity to recommend a book to The Book of the Month Club, I knew exactly which one to choose. What hit me the hardest in 2015 was Jill Leovy's Ghettoside. It's just the sort of thing I go for: an exhaustively researched non-fiction account of people I know nothing about. When those people are from India, as in Katherine Boo's Beyond The Beautiful Forevers one can sort of be forgiven, but in Ghettoside, as in Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's masterful Random Family, the strangers are Americans. They live in our towns, but in another part. The part we avoid, most likely.

This book focuses on the 77th Division of South Central Los Angeles, and follows a number of homicide detectives tasked with solving gang-related murders, the kind buried deep inside the newspaper, or perhaps not mentioned at all. In preparing this recommendation, I read a number of reviews. All of them were positive, and praised the author's reportorial skills. They put the book in context, mentioning the murders of Michael Brown and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. They made it sound important, which it is, and wise. What they left out, and what I so enjoyed about Ghettoside, is that it reads like a novel. It’s meticulously paced and the writing frequently stopped me cold.

What I most loved was how it challenged my expectations. Why had I thought that the detectives—most of them white—wouldn’t care that some gang member was murdered, or that the families of the victims, people to whom gun violence is an everyday event, would accept the deaths of their teenagers without anger or grief, as simply par for the course? Like all great books, this one leaves you thinking, not just "Who are they," but also "Who am I?"

Many of the reviews I read recommended the book as medicine, a disservice, I thought, as it's so enthralling. I feel bad using that word when these are real people, and they're suffering so horribly. It's to the author's credit that Ghettoside is so hard to put down, and that you wind up caring for everyone involved. When killers are caught, you don't feel victorious so much as sad. Another life wasted. Unlike a detective novel where you think, "Well, that happened," here there's the sense of the grinding wheel, one gang-related murder after another. On and on and on. It's relentless and brutal, and Jill Leovy's account of it is art.

Member ratings (206)

Nonfiction
Dead Wake
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Girl Who Smiled Beads
Thick
The Sky Is Falling
Small Fry
Too Much Is Not Enough
All That You Leave Behind
Doing Justice
Falter
The Players Ball
Bitcoin Billionaires
Leaving the Witness
City of Omens
Eyes in the Sky
On The Clock
Wild Game
My Friend Anna
Trick Mirror
Tightrope
Evicted
Big Friendship
Nonfiction
View all
Dead Wake
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Girl Who Smiled Beads
Thick
The Sky Is Falling
Small Fry
Too Much Is Not Enough
All That You Leave Behind
Doing Justice
Falter
The Players Ball
Bitcoin Billionaires
Leaving the Witness
City of Omens
Eyes in the Sky
On The Clock
Wild Game
My Friend Anna
Trick Mirror
Tightrope
Evicted
Big Friendship