Alex Kotlowitz

The Interrupters tells the moving and surprising stories of three Violence Interrupters — former gang members who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they once caused.

The Interrupters tells the moving and surprising stories of three Violence Interrupters — former gang members who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they once caused.

From 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.