Overview

AN IN THE MARGINS BOOK AWARD HONORARY TITLE A ""profound"", heart-wrenching story of violence, grief, and the American justice system, explored through the story of one teenager (Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted). In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez--known as Sito-- was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito's. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on. But for Laurence Ralph, the stepfather of Sito's half-brother--who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth--Sito's murder forced him to revisit the subject in a profoundly different way. Written from Ralph's perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito's family and an Ivy League professor and expert on the entanglement of class and violence, Sito is an intimate story with an message about the lived experience of urban danger and ultimately, grace.

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9781538740323

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Reviews

"""Renegade Dreams is a tour de force―extremely well written and engaging, and replete with original insights. Once I began reading Ralph's book I had a difficult time putting it down. His field research is fascinating. And his explicit discussion of the interconnections of inner-city injury with government, community institutions, as well as how it is related to historical and social processes, is a major contribution."" --William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, on Renegade Dreams ""[A] deeply caring work. . . An essential primer on the roots of police violence.""--Publishers Weekly, on The Torture Letters ""Although it lacks the easy narrative of many traditional ethnographies, this is precisely the book's strength. There is no convenient valorisation of the ordinary extraordinariness of the lives portrayed here. Their dreams are shown to be chaotic, complex and contradictory. Just like life in 'Eastwood.'""--Times Higher Education, on Renegade Dreams ""Astounding in its clarity and groundbreaking in its power, Renegade Dreams is a miraculous as the efforts of its all-American characters to remake life and invent a future without injury.""--Joao Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, on Renegade Dreams ""Compelling. . . It is impossible to read The Torture Letters without the nagging realization that right now, somewhere in the United States, a similar story is playing out in real time. This book matters.""--The Nation, on The Torture Letters ""Ralph brings necessary light to the problem of police torture. A damning indictment of the senseless and seemingly unceasing violence committed by those charged with serving the public.""--Kirkus Reviews, on The Torture Letters"

"""Renegade Dreams is a tour de force―extremely well written and engaging, and replete with original insights. Once I began reading Ralph's book I had a difficult time putting it down. His field research is fascinating. And his explicit discussion of the interconnections of inner-city injury with government, community institutions, as well as how it is related to historical and social processes, is a major contribution."" --William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, on Renegade Dreams ""[A] deeply caring work. . . An essential primer on the roots of police violence.""--Publishers Weekly, on The Torture Letters ""Although it lacks the easy narrative of many traditional ethnographies, this is precisely the book's strength. There is no convenient valorisation of the ordinary extraordinariness of the lives portrayed here. Their dreams are shown to be chaotic, complex and contradictory. Just like life in 'Eastwood.'""--Times Higher Education, on Renegade Dreams ""Astounding in its clarity and groundbreaking in its power, Renegade Dreams is a miraculous as the efforts of its all-American characters to remake life and invent a future without injury.""--Joao Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, on Renegade Dreams ""Compelling. . . It is impossible to read The Torture Letters without the nagging realization that right now, somewhere in the United States, a similar story is playing out in real time. This book matters.""--The Nation, on The Torture Letters ""Humane hands of care molded The Torture Letters in striking contrast to the torturers and complicit powers those very hands exposed. Carefully conceptualized, carefully researched, and carefully written, Ralph reveals a tragic history of police torture in Chicago and a heroic struggle to secure justice for survivors. This book is indispensable.""--Ibram X. Kendi, National Book award-winning author of How to Be an Antiracist, on The Torture Letters ""Ralph brings necessary light to the problem of police torture. A damning indictment of the senseless and seemingly unceasing violence committed by those charged with serving the public.""--Kirkus Reviews, on The Torture Letters ""With great care, skill, and nuance, acclaimed anthropologist Laurence Ralph tells the tragic story of nineteen-year-old Luis Alberto Quiñonez. Drawing on his pioneering research on race, policing, and violence, Ralph takes the reader on a powerful and moving journey that unveils the failures of the criminal justice system in the United States. While there is much to despair, Ralph leaves readers with a deep sense of hope--that the failures of the past can be corrected and that we can build a more just and equitable society where young people like Sito can survive and thrive.""--Keisha N. Blain, coeditor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019"

Author Information

Laurence Ralph is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University, where he is the director for the Center on Transnational Policing. Before that, he was a tenured professor at Harvard University. He is the author of Renegade Dreams and The Torture Letters. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

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