No Children Here By Alex Kotlowitz

Early in his impressive and disturbing book, "no children here," Alex Kotlowitz describes a suburban commuter train passing through West Chicago bleak slums. From a nearby housing project, who has been playing along the track of a boy, he began to cry, because he had been told that the passengers will shoot intruders. These same passengers pulled back from the window, the sniper will strike fear ghetto.

What Kotlowitz provide scene is nothing less than a paradigm of race relations in the United States today. Dialogue at the local and even physical proximity, blacks and whites largely occupied by ignorance and fear of different things. The black middle class, despite its growth, still returns at the end of the working day is generally isolated

His point of view, I suspect, is not the responsibility from LaJoe, a woman beat deleted, but whites tend to make a judgment rhetorical question: what exactly would you do in her place?

Clever narrative impact of the opening ceremony of innocence arches, seek black snake Lafeyette and Pharaoh, and to keep as pets, to the climax, in which the family court judge convicted Lafeyette crime. Between these two poles, Kotlowitz close attention to the behavior and personality of each increment. When Pharaoh develop a stutter or Lafeyette withdraw to cynicism, it is clear that these are not just the adolescent stage. The boy is very user-friendly is beginning to crumble. "I have no friends," Lafeyette told his mother at a point. "Just colleagues. Friend, I assure you."

People do not have the confidence to know why so hard to read the river Kotlowitz account "world. Henry Horner project, once the reconnaissance troops and community gardens downtown, is the 1980s almost uninhabitable basic appliances break and keep disrepair, even once the new stoves rusty basement, surrounded by rotting animal carcasses social plan, once an array of social services have disappeared and budget cuts, and the Reagan-era safety net if nothing but the sum of its