There Are No Children Here (Alex Kotlowitz)

This is the moving and powerful account of two  remarkable boys struggling to survive in Chicago”s  Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex  disfigured by crime and neglect.

Publishers Weekly

The devastating story of brothers Lafayette and Pharoah Rivers, children of the Chicago ghetto, is powerfully told here by Kotlowitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter who first met the boys in 1985 when they were 10 and seven, respectively. Their family includes a mother, a frequently absent father, an older brother and younger triplets. We witness the horrors of growing up in an ill-maintained housing project tyrannized by drug gangs and where murders and shootings frequently occur. Lafayette tries to cope by stifling his emotions and turning himself into an automaton, while Pharoah first attempts to regress into early childhood and then finds a way out by excelling at school. Kotlowitz”s affecting report does not have a “neat and tidy ending. . . . It is, instead, about a beginning, the dawning of two lives.”” These are lives at a crossroads, not totally without hope of triumphing over their origin. ( Apr .