Lawyer, community activist, and teacher Jamil Jivani recently visited our Toronto office for a chat about his upcoming book Why Young Men (being published March 2018).

“It started off as a book that was going to focus mostly on extremism and it grew into a book about young people that don’t necessarily become the most extreme examples of how communities struggle, but are growing up in the same context as the people as we see in the news headlines,” says Jivani.

He says he wove in moments from his own turbulent youth growing up in Brampton with time spent in Toronto’s stigmatized Jane and Finch neighbourhood and work in the United States and Europe. The parallels he draws raise some interesting questions surrounding young men and detachment, crime, a decreasing role in families, and underlines why society needs to be paying more attention.

Watch the video above to hear more.