A New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller
A Book of the Year (2015) for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Daily Beast, The Globe and Mail, Amazon.com, and the Economist
Winner, Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism, 2016 (New York Public Library)
Winner, 2016 Ridenhour Book Prize
Winner, B&N Discover Book of the Year, Nonfiction
Winner, Pen USA 2016 literary award - Research Nonfiction
Winner, California Book Award, Nonfiction Gold Medal
Winner, 2015 Carla Furstenburg Cohen Literary Prize in Nonfiction
Nominated, 2015 National Book Critics Circle, General Nonfiction
Nominated, NAACP Image Awards, Outstanding Literary Work (nonfiction)
“a serious and kaleidoscopic achievement … tidal in its force … displaying an almost Tolstoyan level of human sympathy … complex and persuasive… [this] book is persistent as hell” - Dwight Garner, NYT
“relentless reporting has produced a book with valuable, hard-won insights…” - Jennifer Gonnerman, NYTBR
“gritty reporting that matches the police work behind it… Her premise is simple, powerful and runs counter to prevailing views. … masterful… clear and compelling" - Sudhir Venkatesh, author of GANGLEADER FOR A DAY, reviewed in the LA Times.
"Ghettoside … is like those Mathew Brady photographs of the Civil War, revealing to the nation bloody battlefields it would not otherwise see." - Newsweek
"a thorough, unsentimental and painstakingly evenhanded account … moving and engrossing"
- San Francisco Chronicle
“gripping … this timely book could not be more important."
- Associated Press (attached)
"penetrating and heartbreaking … presents a riveting close-up”
- USA Today
a snappy police procedural and — more significantly — as a searing indictment of legal neglect….Leovy’s powerful testimony demands respectful attention.
- Boston Globe
“Ghettoside is fantastic. It does what the best narrative nonfiction does: It transcends its subject by taking one person’s journey and making it all our journeys. That’s what makes this not just a gritty, heart-wrenching, and telling book, but an important one. From the patrol cop to the President, everyone needs to read this book.”—Michael Connelly
“Jill Leovy writes with exceptional sharpness and tautness, and her pages glow and glitter with the found poetry of the street. This book will take an honored place on the shelf that includes David Simon’s classic Homicide and Michelle Alexander’s explosive study of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow.”—Martin Amis
“A gripping and powerful account of urban homicide investigation in the United States.”—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove
“Unmissable . . . I’m astonished by Jill Leovy’s forthcoming Ghettoside. Police and race in America are examined with forensic skill and furious, exceptional prose. Lucid, revelatory, superbly written, incredibly timely. A book of the year.”—Chris Cleave, author of Little Bee
“Ghettoside is a brilliant taxonomic investigation into the American violence epidemic disguised as a highly entertaining true crime book.”—Matt Taibbi, author of The Divide
“What an amazing book—a totally gripping piece of reporting.”—Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking
“Absorbing . . . Readers may come for Leovy’s detective story; they will stay for her lucid social critique.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)