ANOTHER DAY IN THE DEATH OF AMERICA

A Chronicle of 10 Short Lives

By Gary Younge

267 pp. Nation Books, $25.99.

On and around the unexceptional date of Nov. 23, 2013, the 10 young people chronicled herein died from gunfire. All were working class, all were male and seven were black. That, the author asserts, is no coincidence. On its surface, this compelling volume is a series of mini-biographies — like that of the unarmed Gary Anderson, 18, cut down while walking to his mother’s apartment in Newark, N.J. It was apparently a revenge murder based on mistaken identity; Anderson was wearing a red hoodie like that worn by someone “who killed somebody up the street” the day before.

Younge conveys this and nine other personal histories with reportorial assurance and compassion. Woven throughout is a larger theme — this country’s unique confluence of race, class and firearms. To find “a murder rate on a par with that in black America,” Younge writes, “you have to look to Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria or Rwanda.” In the main, his thesis — that longstanding injustices undergird the disproportionate killings of minority youth — is persuasive enough to discomfit certain white readers who notice gun violence only when it is unleashed on places like Sandy Hook.

Younge’s integration of narrative threads doesn’t always come off. At one point, details of 19-year-old Kenneth Mills-Tucker’s demise elude him: “We don’t know if he . . . ever touched a gun, if he was carrying a gun the night he died, or if he ever did anything more criminal than failing to come to a full stop at a stop sign with marijuana residue allegedly in his pipe.” So Younge falls back on dark descriptions of the 2014 National Rifle Association convention in the victim’s hometown and an aside about Emmett Till.