A shattering work that shifts between a woman's private anguish over the loss of her beloved baby cousin and a scholar's fierce critique of the American prison system, Daniella Allen's 'Cuz' seeks answers to what, for many years, felt unanswerable. Why? Why did her cousin, a precocious young man who dreamed of being a firefighter and a writer, end up dead? Why did he languish in prison? And why, at the age of fifteen, was he in an alley in South Central Los Angeles, holding a gun while trying to steal someone's car? 'Cuz' means both "cousin" and "because". In this searing memoir, Allen unfurls a "new American story" about a world tragically transformed by the sudden availability of narcotics and the rise of street gangs--a collision, followed by a reactionary War on Drugs, that would devastate virtually every urban center in the nation. At thirteen, sensitive, talkative Michael Allen was suddenly tossed into this cauldron, the violent world of South Central L.A., where he would be tried at fifteen as an adult for an ATTEMPTED carjacking, and where he would be sent cascading into the spiral of the California prison system. Throughout her cousin Michael's eleven years in prison, Danielle Allen--who became a dean at the University of Chicago at the age of thirty-two--remained psychically bonded to her self-appointed charge, visiting Michael in prison and corresponding with him regularly. When she finally welcomed her baby cousin home, she adopted the role of "cousin on duty," devotedly supporting Michael's fresh start while juggling the demands of her own academic career. As 'Cuz' heartbreakingly reveals, even Allen's devotion could not save Michael from the brutal realities encountered by newly released young men navigfating the streets of South Central. the corrosive entanglements of gang warfare, combined with a star-crossed love for a woman driving a gold Mercedes, would ultimately be Michael's undoing. In this Illisonian story of a young African American man's coming-of-age in late twentieth-century America, and of the family who will always love Michael, we learn how we lost an entire generation.