2 Books to Read Post-Election

"In a murderous time," wrote Stanley Kunitz, "the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking." You can feel that mourning in journalist Gary Younge's Another Day in the Death of America (Nation Books). Younge looks American gun culture through the lens of his most vulnerable targets–kids. He tracks down as many stories as he can find of people age 19 and younger who died in shootings on a single day. In these vivid chronicles, we meet, among others, Tyler, 11, and Edwin, 16, both accidentally shot by their friends, and Samuel, 16 gunned down in Dallas, the subject of the chillingly blasé headline "Teen Fatally Shot While Walking Down Street." There is a quiet desperation in these pages, a tempered outrage at the disturbing silence surrounding so many of the deaths. Sad, frustrating, but profoundly humane and ultimately illuminating, Another Day is political writing at its best.