“Binged Making a Murderer? Try . . . [this] riveting portrait of a tragic, preventable crime.” —Entertainment Weekly 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. Reviews and Endorsements: One of Library Journal’s 10 Best Books of the Year One of Mother Jones’ 20 Notable Books of the Year One of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Best Books of the Year “Expertly crafted . . . [Sanders’] evenhanded reporting and emotional commitment to the story make for gripping reading.” —The Washington Post “A heartbreaking—and compelling—story from every angle . . . Americans have long been fascinated by true-crime stories, from Truman Capote’s 1966 masterpiece, In Cold Blood, through this year’s binge-worthy TV series Making a Murderer. The bad guy is always mesmerizing. What makes a person go to that dark side? Sanders works hard to provide the answers. . . . [He] does a terrific job of telling the life stories of all three principal characters.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “[A] disturbing, sometimes-horrifying story of true crime and justice only partially served.” —The Huffington Post, “11 Books That Grab You from Page One” “Inspiring . . . From a harrowing crime, it draws powerful lessons for our mental health and criminal justice systems that can’t be ignored.” —Sister Helen Prejean, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dead Man Walking “An arresting narrative . . . Certainly a story worth telling with lessons well worth learning. . . . It’s heartbreaking all the way around.” —The Seattle Times “Written with great sensitivity and even greater beauty.” —Jeff Hobbs, New York Times bestselling author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace “Gripping . . . Moving and unsettling . . . Told with incredible sensitivity.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “While the City Slept reveals the American landscape of a horrific crime. Eli Sanders, with a rare quality of attention, does this clearly and judiciously. Because of his outstanding reporting, we see not only the complex workings of one’s environment on the course of one’s life, but also how what we consider a tragedy is almost an inevitability—and how, of course, it doesn’t have to be.” —Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, New York Times bestselling author of Random Family “Compassionate . . . A meticulous indictment of the way America reckons with mental illness.” —Mother Jones “Engrossing, elegantly written . . . A story that we need to hear.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer About the Author: Eli Sanders is the associate editor of Seattle’s weekly newspaper The Stranger. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2012 for his reporting on the murder of Teresa Butz. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The American Prospect, and Salon, among other publications. Sanders lives in Seattle. |