Another Day In The Death Of America

Gary Younge

Guardian Faber, £16.99

I ONCE met Gary Younge. It was in Port-au-Prince, the capital of the Caribbean island of Haiti during the coup d'etat there in 2004. Along with many other journalists we were staying at the Hotel Montana, overlooking the city. During our brief encounter we simply exchanged a few pleasantries and talked inevitably about the ongoing crisis we were there to cover.

Having read Younge’s dispatches in The Guardian newspaper for which he worked as US correspondent, I had always thought him a terrific reporter, and couldn’t help wondering what kind of stuff he would write about the Haitian turmoil going on around us. Like so much of Haiti’s past it was a nasty period, the streets anarchic and full of people with guns.

Guns and their victims form the subject matter of Younge’s latest book, Another Day In The Death of America. What a magnificent piece of reportage it is too. The premise of the book is a simple, if rather challenging in terms of the narrative task the author set himself. That narrative has its roots in Younge’s earlier reporting based as the book is on a lengthy article he wrote for the Guardian in 2007. In that piece one of the shootings covered featured a 16-year-old boy in Detroit, who was shot dead while shopping for video games by an off-duty policeman moonlighting as a security guard.

This theme of shootings, gun crime and violence set against the political backdrop of contemporary America is revisited in Younge’s new book. It takes as its starting point the fact that on any given day, on average, seven children age 19 and younger will be shot and killed somewhere in the United States.

Choosing a day at random, November 23, 2013, Younge chronicles the lives of all 10 Americans under 19 who were killed by guns that day. In the absence of any central database that tracks the number of gun-related murders, Younge used internet searches to find the names of the 10 then set about travelling to locate their families and reveal their individual back stories. It’s apparent from the start that Younge has used his not inconsiderable investigative journalistic talents to go about finding the material he needs. Impressive as this is, it’s the way that material is marshalled that makes this book such a searing and often poignant snapshot of American life.

These individual stories range from the innocence of nine-year-old Jaiden Dixon, shot at close range by his mother’s ex-boyfriend on his doorstep in Ohio, to 18-year-old Tyshon Anderson from Chicago, who was already deeply involved in violent youth culture as a member of the Lakeside Gangster Disciples. The deaths in the day Younge uses as his narrative canvas were, by and large, representative of what most of us would think of in terms of typical gun-related child murders in the US. All the victims were boys. Seven were black, two were Latino, one was white. Some were clearly gang members. In the story of Tyshon Anderson from Chicago, Younge gives some idea of the scale and intensity of gun violence by outlining how in eight of the 10 years prior to the day his book was written, the number of murders in Chicago was greater than the number of US fatalities in Afghanistan. Indeed he points out that the city became disparagingly known as Chiraq, a variation of which (Chi-Raq) would later become the title of the Spike Lee film about gun violence in the city.

Despite its grim subject matter, the book is written beautifully with elegance and heartfelt compassion. At times, one is reminded of the work of that other great chronicler of American life, Studs Terkel, and of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, whose dispatches from the world’s trouble-spots transformed the humble job of reporting into literary art.

There is a real sense here of getting beneath the skin of those he talks with, especially family members of the victims.While the victims’ stories provide the compelling thread that takes the reader through the book, they are skilfully woven in with wider observations on the state of America today. He visits a National Rifle Association convention and the rural Michigan town where 11-year-old Tyler Dunn lived and died. This popular hunting location is a place where guns are terrifyingly commonplace. Indeed the ubiquity of weapons across the US is one of the most chilling aspects of the story the book covers. Guns, family, youth, class, race, this is a cameo portrait of contemporary America written at a time when the nation politically is perhaps going through one of its most turbulent and embittered periods in modern times.

My only criticism is with the jacket design of the British edition, in which an idealised 1950s poster portrait of a “typical” American family has the book’s title superimposed in a heavy black font that make it visually a bit of a dog’s breakfast. The US edition cover is far better. But this is a quibble. It’s the words that lie between the front and back jacket that really matter, and on that score this is a memorable book of reportage. I’m not surprised to hear that film rights have already been snatched up. Do read this, though, before seeing any film version of it.