The Shooting · A Memoir

"Kemp Powers is a journalist whose articles have been read by millions. But he has a secret. In ninth grade, in Brooklyn, while he and his friends were playing after school, he found one of his mother's guns and accidentally shot and killed his best friend Henry." "Henry was one of seven homicides that day. His parents didn't press charges, and Kemp was forgiven by everyone, including the state of New York. But he couldn't forgive himself. He thought about Henry every day and made a promise never to make a mistake again - a promise a child naively made that the adult couldn't keep." After nearly two decades of silence, Kemp Powers reveals the harrowing details of that afternoon - and the nightmares, both literal and figurative, that have plagued him ever since. Here is an account of a commitment at once severed and affirmed; a memoir of 1980s Brooklyn; and an allegory of sin and atonement.