In 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, Danielle Allen 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. At thirteen, sensitive, talkative Michael Allen was suddenly tossed into this cauldron, a violent world where he would be tried at fifteen as an adult for an attempted carjacking, and where he would be sent, along with an entire generation, cascading into the spiral of the Los Angeles prison system. When she finally welcomed her baby cousin home, Danielle adopted the role of ‘cousin on duty,’ devotedly supporting Michael’s fresh start, but as Cuz heartbreakingly reveals, even Allen’s devotion, as unwavering as it was, could not save Michael from the brutal realities encountered by newly released young men navigating the streets of South Central.   In this Ellisonian 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. “[Allen] puts a face to the numbing statistics of incarcerated young black boys and men. . . . At its heart, Allen’s book is both an outcry and entreaty as she grapples with a painful reality.” -Publishers Weekly