"On the eve of Christmas Eve..." Paul Auster writes, "Tyler Kobe Nichols collapsed onto the sidewalk with three knife wounds in the front of his torso and one in the back."
His death soon followed. With it, the twenty-one-year-old joined the ranks of young people killed by senseless violence in America. Tyler's death warranted just two paragraphs in the New York Daily News. And yet with each death, a new story begins that is rarely if ever told; one that centers around the fallout from traumatic loss. This story, as Tyler's mother Sherma Chambers keenly observes, is generational, with no clear end in sight.
Long Live King Kobe began with a mistake. Photographer Spencer Ostrander had arrived at the funeral for Tyler believing he was a victim of gun violence, and hoping to include him in an ongoing project Ostrander had created to document the lives of gun victims. Instead, he met Sherma Chambers, and a week later a collaboration, which soon included Paul Auster, had begun--one in which a pair of strangers would join a family in their sorrow.
Thanks to the generosity of the entire Nichols/Chambers family, Long Live King Kobe invites us to join them in their intimate grief in the weeks that followed Tyler's death. The family's response to his murder, including their creation of a foundation dedicated to counteracting street violence with love, is one that presents their tragedy as a means for our society to grow.
Long Live King Kobe offers a privileged journey into the power of community for all who have felt outrage, confusion, sadness, and deep despair at the epidemic of violence in our country. It also provides reason to hope. The Long Live King Kobe Foundation, started by Sherma Chambers, will support nonviolence initiatives to keep youth safe. Proceeds from this book will benefit the foundation.
Industry Reviews
"These photographs, this story, they are hard to deal with, yet one goes back to the pages, because we have the freedom to turn away from the tragedy, but the family and friends of Tyler Kobe Nichols do not. Their tributes are eloquent, as is the testimony in their faces. This is not black-on-black crime, this is the American way of death, as Ostrander's haunting work so powerfully tells us." -Darryl Pinckney, Author of High Cotton and Black Deutschland "This engrossing book reminds us how often such stories are ignored or overlooked. A loss so inexplicable might be forgotten by all but those who knew Tyler Kobe Nichols without these images and testimonies. The empty living rooms, barber's chairs and neighborhood corners are filled with his presence. He is alive in the lives he touched. He is alive in us. I keep thinking about the condolence card from his mother's co-workers. We people who did not know him have a chance to know him here. Our sympathies become commemorations; our prayers become praise songs. We are given the gift of witness." -Terrance Hayes, Poet "How can we do justice to a gentle, openhearted 21-year old who was violently, randomly murdered? How can the particulars of his life and character outlast the horror of his death? Photographs often seize on extremities: the ugly evidence of the crime, the uncontainable grief of friends and family. What Spencer Ostrander gives us instead is a quiet space where each mourner thinks and remembers, confronts and yields to loss, hour by hour and day by day. Here is the evidence of things seen, known, and loved: Tyler's playground basketball hoop; Tyler's face tattooed on the arms of family and friends; the red barbershop chair where he got his last haircut; the memorial candles glowing softly; a cousin touching a picture frame as if his hand could bestow life on Tyler's image. Death imposes solitude on every mourner-we each bear the burden of loss alone. And yet, as we turn the pages of this quietly powerful book, we also feel the collective sorrow of this family. Their closeness. Their valor in accepting the burdens and range of grief. Ostrander does not let us presume. He lets us honor their mourning with empathic respect." -Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and author of Negroland
