</p><b>An intimate and powerful rumination on American gun<br>violence by Paul Auster, one of our greatest living writers and "genuine<br>American original" (<i>The Boston Globe</i>), in an unforgettable collaboration<br>with photographer Spencer Ostrander</b></p>Like most American boys of his generation, Paul Auster grew<br>up playing with toy six-shooters and mimicking the gun-slinging cowboys in B<br>Westerns. A skilled marksman by the age of ten, he also lived through the<br>traumatic aftermath of the murder of his grandfather by his grandmother when<br>his father was a child and knows, through firsthand experience, how families<br>can be wrecked by a single act of gun violence.</p>In this short, searing book, Auster traces centuries of<br>America's use and abuse of guns, from the violent displacement of the native<br>population to the forced enslavement of millions, to the bitter divide between<br>embattled gun control and anti-gun control camps that has developed over the<br>past 50 years and the mass shootings that dominate the news today. Since 1968, <br>more than one and a half million Americans have been killed by guns. The<br>numbers are so large, so catastrophic, so disproportionate to what goes on<br>elsewhere, that one must ask why. Why is America so different--and why are we<br>the most violent country in the Western world?</p>Interwoven with Spencer Ostrander's haunting photographs of<br>the sites of more than thirty mass shootings in all parts of the country