To understand gun crime in America, the Guardian journalist Gary Younge picked a date at random from his calendar: November 23, 2013. He then investigated every one of the 10 people shot dead that day all over the US: who they were and why they died – from the cornfields of rural Michigan to the ganglands of Chicago, where the sound of gunfire is so common that the dogs are said to have stopped barking at it. The resulting book puts human faces on numbers that are so big they can seem meaningless.