Un país banyat en sang

Paul Auster, like most American children, grew up playing with toy guns and imitating cowboys in Westerns. But he also learned that families can be torn apart by violence: his grandmother shot and killed his grandfather when his father was just six years old, affecting the lives of the entire family for decades. No issue divides Americans more than the gun debate, and every day more than 100 people die from guns. These figures are so far from what happens in other countries that one can only wonder why. "Why is the United States so different, and what makes us the most violent country in the Western world?" Auster writes. Paul Auster's narrative mastery meets Spencer Ostrander's striking photographs in a book that mixes biography, historical anecdotes, and accurate data analysis. A country bathed in blood ranges from the origin of the United States, marked by the armed conflict against the native population and the enslavement of millions of people, to the mass shootings that dominate the news, in a vicious circle that feeds on itself.