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different histories. We speak different languages,” she writes.
Still, Tamar Jacoby praised Kotlowitz’s skill in “flushing out the inherited fears, personal slights
and pent-up resentments that shape the color-coded lens through which many people see the world. It
is a harrowing ride, and by the end, the black view of McGinnis’s death emerges so sharply that it
makes a kind of sense even for skeptical white readers,” she writes in the Los Angeles Times.
Aside from its poetic language and narrative daring, the most remarkable thing about The Other
Side of the River is its utter break—structurally, thematically—from There Are No Children Here.
Beyond Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground and William Finnegan’s Cold New World, few books have
so successfully examined the ways in which race manifests itself in both black and white America. In
The Other Side of the River Kotlowitz appeared for the first time as a character in his own work—
serving as an impartial guide to the two towns. In contrast to the third person narrative of There Are
No Children Here, which reads like a novel, Kotlowitz’s second book has the feel of a murder
mystery, in which the reader is led by the story’s chief investigator. Both are profoundly intimate
books, but in completely different genres.
In addition to his writing, Kotlowitz returned to radio in 2003, winning a Peabody Award for
coproducing “Stories of Home,” a collection of audio essays that aired on Chicago Public Radio. His
most recent writing project is Never a City So Real (2004), a book about Chicago.
You’ve described your work as “the journalism of empathy.” What is that?
I’ve come to realize that in my writing, I’m looking for empathy. And it works on two planes. First,
I try to put myself in the shoes of my subjects, to be able to look at and understand the world through
their eyes. To do so, I have to set aside my preconceptions. I have to open myself up. But secondly, I
look to achieve empathy with my readers. To get them to a place where they, too, are in the shoes of
my characters, and in some cases, as with my second book, in my shoes, empathizing with me, the
narrator.
What kinds of subjects are you generally drawn to?
I’m drawn to stories along the margins, to communities that are tucked away in the crevices of the
country, to the sorts of people who reporters don’t typically spend much time with. For me, the joy of
what I do is finding and telling stories that haven’t been told publicly before. Nothing’s as
exhilarating—and ultimately as intimidating— as discovering that untold tale. There are plenty of
reporters out there writing about the powerful and the wealthy and doing a hell of a good job at it. But
for me, I find myself running from the center of the storm.
What do you do when forced to write about a big story?
I guess I think of most of my stories as “big” in the sense that they all, I hope, give us reason to
reflect on the human condition. But you’re right that I don’t often find myself reporting and writing on
a story which is front-page news. But it happens on occasion, as when for The New Yorker I wrote on
a case in Chicago in which two boys were falsely accused of killing an eleven-year-old girl [“The