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While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man's Descent into Madness - Eli Sanders
While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man's Descent into Madness
by: (author)
3.20 25
A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter’s gripping account of one young man’s path to murder—and a wake-up call for mental health care in America On a summer night in 2009, three lives intersected in one American neighborhood. Two people newly in love—Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, who spent many... show more
A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter’s gripping account of one young man’s path to murder—and a wake-up call for mental health care in America

On a summer night in 2009, three lives intersected in one American neighborhood. Two people newly in love—Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, who spent many years trying to find themselves and who eventually found each other—and a young man on a dangerous psychological descent: Isaiah Kalebu, age twenty-three, the son of a distant, authoritarian father and a mother with a family history of mental illness. All three paths forever altered by a violent crime, all three stories a wake-up call to the system that failed to see the signs.

In this riveting, probing, compassionate account of a murder in Seattle, Eli Sanders, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper coverage of the crime, offers a deeply reported portrait in microcosm of the state of mental health care in this country—as well as an inspiring story of love and forgiveness. Culminating in Kalebu’s dangerous slide toward violence—observed by family members, police, mental health workers, lawyers, and judges, but stopped by no one—While the City Slept is the story of a crime of opportunity and of the string of missed opportunities that made it possible. It shows what can happen when a disturbed member of society repeatedly falls through the cracks, and in the tradition of The Other Wes Moore and The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, is an indelible, human-level story, brilliantly told, with the potential to inspire social change.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN: 9780670015719 (0670015717)
ASIN: 670015717
Publisher: Viking Books
Pages no: 336
Edition language: English
Category:
Crime
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Community Reviews
KatieMc
KatieMc rated it
2.0 While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man's Descent into Madness
I guess this shows that distinction in journalism doesn't necessarily translate to books. The theme centered around the flaws in how we as a society care of the mentally ill, and that is a worthy topic to explore. It was a sad story with many lives irreparably broken in the wake of Isaiah Kalebu...
JeffreyKeeten
JeffreyKeeten rated it
5.0 WHILE THE CITY SLEPT BY ELI SANDERS
****Eli Sanders won the Pulitzer Prize for his compassionate reporting about this crime.****”They had feared him, and it was fear of a certain kind. Not the primal, salable fear of violence, not fright of the unexpected arriving with sudden brutality from an unknowable beyond. Theirs was fear of a k...
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