The Arroyo Book Club’s April Pick….

The book the Arroyo Book Club will be reading for April is Ghettoside by Jill Leovy.  As always this is a book I have not yet read so let me have Amazon.com provide you with the book description:

On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes.

But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift.

Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly ignored, American murder—a “ghettoside” killing, one young black man slaying another—and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs. Ghettoside is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in our cities—and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped.

A nice combination of true crime and social issues, definitely a book that will lay the groundwork for discussion.  For this particular book I’d like us to generate our own discussion questions so read it with a pen and paper handy and note down interesting questions as they occur to you, then bring those questions with you when you come to book discussion on April 22 at 3:00.  As always you can pick up a copy of the book from the library.