Book Recommendation: Wrong Place, Wrong Time

January 25, 2010 by blackgirlgrown
Filed under race

What: Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men by John A. Rich

Why: In a book review for the Washington Post, columnist Colbert I. King writes:

The shooting of a young black male doesn’t make the front page. It’s most likely to appear inside the Metro section — that is, if the victim dies. Even then, he’s unlikely to receive more than a couple of inches of print. After all, it’s the same old story: young black men killing other young black men. What’s the big deal? The shooter and the victim are assumed to be drug dealers or gang-bangers doing their thing in a part of town where people of means and good sense would never venture.

Which is why those of us who spend time tracking violence and its impact on every aspect of life in urban America — as well as anyone with an ounce of humanity — ought to be thrilled to see a book like “Wrong Place, Wrong Time” come along. It looks beyond the gunplay, offering a window on urban violence by putting faces with the cold statistics and presenting stories in the victims’ own words. The author, John A. Rich, a former medical director of the Boston Public Health Commission and currently a professor at Drexel University’s School of Public Health and director of the Center for Academic Public Health Practice, comes to the subject from the vantage point of having worked on the problem at ground zero.