A Chronicle Of 10 Short Lives

Another Day in the Death of America is an indictment of the lack of gun control in the United States, Its not a book about gun control but a book about what happens in a country where there is none. I chose this book to read on the plane during a couple of long haul flights across the globe, I chose the right book.

Saturday November 23rd, 2013 – An everyday Saturday on which ten children were killed by gunfire – the youngest was 9, the oldest was 19. Gary Younge, award winning political journalist and editor-at-large for the Guardian, picked this day at random, he then searched for their families and told their stories.

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.

Not all of the children were innocents and as Younge allows their stories to be told he details the conditions which turn the powerless, disenfranchised and excluded into victims of gun violence. What emerges is a scathing portrait of childhood and youth in contemporary America. Younge’s mission is to make the statistics surrounding gun violence human – and he succeeds wholeheartedly.