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Book Cover for: The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma, Alex Kotlowitz

The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma

Alex Kotlowitz

Winner:Great Lakes Book Awards -Nonfiction (1999)
Seperated by the St.Joseph River, St.Joseph and Benton HArbor are two Michigan towns that are geographically close, yet in every sense worlds apart. St.Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community, 95 percent white, while Benton HArbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of Eric McGinnis, a black teenage boy from Benton Harbor, is found in the river, relations between the two communities grow increasingly strained as long hels misperceptions and attitudes surface. As Family, friends, and the police struggle to find out how and why McGinnis died, Alex Kotlowitz uncovers layers of both evidence and opinion, and demonstrates that in many ways, the truth is shaped by which side of the river you call home.

Thoughtful and affecting, "The Other Side of the River" proves once again that Alex Kotlowitz is one of our foremost writers on the ever--explosive issue of race. In an afterword to this Anchor edition, Kotlowitz discusses the reaction to the book in the communities it deals with.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publish Date: Jan 19th, 1999
  • Pages: 336
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.06in - 5.22in - 0.79in - 0.55lb
  • EAN: 9780385477215
  • Categories: Minority StudiesUnited States - State & Local - GeneralDiscrimination

About the Author

ALEX KOTLOWITZ is perhaps best known for his national bestseller, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, which the New York Public Library selected as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. Alex's nonfiction stories, which one critic wrote "inform the heart", have appeared in print, radio and film. A former staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, Alex has long been a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and public radio's This American Life. His stories, which one reviewer wrote "inform the heart", have also appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Rolling Stone, The Chicago Tribune, Slate and The Washington Post, as well as on PBS (Frontline, the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and Media Matters) and on NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition. He's been honored with some of journalism's major prizes: a George Foster Peabody Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the George Polk Award and twice a Columbia duPont Award.

Praise for this book

"I was impressed and enthralled...This book has suspense and style, and the delight of real substance presented with grace...a work of great narrative power, superb reporting, and profound empathy--in other words, a joy." --Scott Turow

"A riveting portrait of a racially troubled America in the 1990's." --Publishers Weekly (starred)

"A vivid American microcosm, a telling tableau of the way we are." --The New York Times