As he slowly dies on the pavement, his killer hops into a waiting SUV and peels away. “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America” opens with a brutal set piece: On a gorgeous Southern Californian afternoon, mild-mannered Bryant Tennelle - 18 years old, fond of animals, the son of a Costa Rican immigrant and a respected black homicide detective committed to living in the neighborhood he policed - has part of his brain blown into his Houston Astros cap as he is walking down his street. Fortunately, Jill Leovy, a journalist at the Los Angeles Times who has concerned herself for years with the underreported (and often not reported at all) homicide pandemic in the less glamorous corners of Los Angeles, has written such a book. Now is probably as good a moment as any in our fickle American discourse for the publication of a thorough, unsentimental and painstakingly evenhanded account of the tortured and multigenerational dynamics plaguing our nation’s ghettos - and the senseless killings that so routinely occur in them, whether at the hands of the police or, as we are so frequently reminded, at the hands of other blacks.
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