Gangs: Stories of Life and Death from the Streets

Book Overview

Gang life is both the starting point and the dark side of the American dream. Ethnic groups and immigrants have long turned to gangs for protection and support when it was offered nowhere else. From the Five Points to South Central L.A., Bowery Boys to Bloods and Crips, the James gang to gangsta rap, gangs offer a largely urban version of the American frontier: an opportunity and a refuge for society's outlaws, outcasts, and outsiders. Featuring superb writing drawn from the best fiction, nonfiction, and journalism, Gangs takes the reader on a tour of this underground, from accounts of New York's violent past by Herbert Asbury (The Gangs of New York) and Mark Helprin (A Winter's Tale) to Hunter S. Thompson's unflinching report from within the Hell's Angels and T. J. English inside America's most notorious Vietnamese gang. Other selections bring readers into the Irish, Italian, and Jewish Mobs as well as the Triads of America's Chinatowns, and chart the role of the vicious drug trade in contemporary gang life. With photographs and its wild and turbulent tour through the American underworld, Gangs paints a visceral and fascinating picture of a part of the American experience that is more nightmare than dream.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560254254
• ISBN13: 9781560254256
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A winner you will not want to put down.

Way more than just the LA Crip/Blood stereotype. That's in there, sure, but Sean Donahue has also chosen really readable selections on soccer hooligans, neo-nazis and the skinheads who are NOT nazis, NY gangs of the 1800's, common street tough gangs, organized drug dealers, kidnap rings in El Salvador, Vietnamese gangs and two fascinating "anti-gang" pieces on a DA who turned to the dark side trying to bust up a gang, and a gang being decimated by drug addiction. It's fast-paced, exciting, and you'll find yourself staying up late to read "just one more" story. My only off-note: regrettably there is none of Hunter Thompson Hell's Angels work; I'd have swapped that for the Clockwork Orange excerpt. But you'll really enjoy what IS in there and probably learn something. About half the selections are full pieces, not excerpts, but the stuff pulled from bigger works is well chosen and you don't feel left hanging. It's just over 300 pages.