The American Way of Killing

About this book

Malcolm Gladwell returns with a brilliant new work: an incisive investigation into gun violence, America's deadliest and most polarizing crisis. Why, when it comes to lethal violence, is America so different from the rest of the globe? The United States is wealthier, better educated, more technologically sophisticated, more religious than almost any of its peers in the developed world--all of which would suggest that it should also have the lowest levels of violence. Yet the opposite is true. In this bold new book, Malcolm Gladwell investigates the paradox through a series of stories--the miracle of a young gunshot victim in Washington, D.C., the legal travails of a seventeenth-century English knight, a professor in Alabama with a terrible secret, a famous town in Kansas that Americans have been lying to each other about for 100 years, and a prison in Germany that would be unrecognizable to any American, among others. Using original interviews, archival footage, and his trademark insight, Gladwell confronts one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examines what's actually being done to fix it.