Discover the Best Books Written by Jill Leovy

Jill Leovy is a nonfiction author. Her current book-in-progress, to be published by One World Books of Penguin/Random House, is a scholarly inquiry into “petty” disputes and their outsized influence in shaping the world we live in. It draws on anthropology, classics, and literary and historical studies to tell the story of rancor, envy, revenge, and personal violence in the human past. It suggests that we should better appreciate this complex backstory to understand the antagonisms of the present.

It is an outgrowth of her first book, “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America” (Random House 2015), which was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the California Book Award for nonfiction, the Ridenhour Prize for truth-telling, the PEN Center USA Literary Award for research non-fiction, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award. 

“Ghettoside,” a blend of street reporting and scholarship, introduced and elaborated the idea that high-crime communities are simultaneously under-policed and over-policed. It further broke ground by locating the causes of urban violence in problems of law, not in family structure, culture, psychological differences, or other familiar scapegoats. “Ghettoside” was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Economist. 

The criminologist David Kennedy described it as “the most important book about urban violence in a generation.” Novelist Martin Amis said Leovy’s writing “glows with the found poetry of the street,” and New York Times book critic Dwight Garner lauded it as “Tolstoyan in its sympathies.”

Leovy was a sociology fellow at Harvard University 2020-2022 and is a former newspaper crime reporter who spent a decade covering gang killings and police in the highest crime neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. Her online multimedia project, “The Homicide Report,” detailed more than 800 murders in Los Angeles County in a single year, 2007. 

She worked for the Seattle Times, the News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash., and the Los Angeles Times. More recently, her work has appeared in the American Scholar, the Wall Street Journal, the (London) Telegraph, Slate, the Marshall Project, and the academic book “Post-Ghetto: Reimagining South Los Angeles” (UC/Huntington Library Press, 2012).