Review by Booklist Review
Bing has been writing about gang life for the past four years and has earned the trust of various members of South Central L.A.'s notorious and factious Crips and Bloods. Her revelatory interviews with gang members of various ages and experiences immerse readers in the highly specific language, routine, and mentality of gangbangers. What emerges is a bleak social landscape wracked by violence for violence's sake and drenched in fatalism, alienation, and suffering. In conversation after conversation, African American homeboys and homegirls tell the same story: to live is to fight, the only world that matters is the 'hood, earning respect is the goal, and killing people is a thoroughly acceptable means to that end. Bing, keenly observant as well as consistently unsentimental, unflappable, honest, and coolly courageous, visits gang members at home and in jails. While she does amass predictable tales of crime and murder, she also assembles heartbreaking portraits of startlingly articulate, complex, and fierce individuals. A searing investigation into a realm that must be understood and confronted. ~--Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Bing is a gutsy reporter. For the past four years, she has been reporting on gang life in the Los Angeles area for the L.A. Weekly and apparently has gained the complete trust of the two major gangs, the ``Crips'' and the ``Bloods.'' She tells the story of individual gang members, such as G-Roc, Baby Track, and Bianca, real people caught up in an astonishing real war occurring daily in California. The common elements running through all their stories are poverty, lack of family cohesion, lack of societal and individual respect, and drugs. This is not an in-depth sociological study, attempting to find the roots of ``gang life,'' but rather a very colorful portrait of a disturbing subculture. It belongs in comprehensive collections of studies of gang life. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/91.-- Sandra K. Lindheimer, Middlesex Law Lib., Cambridge, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
YA-- A superb documentary of gang life in Los Angeles. The author has interviewed countless members of the ``Bloods'' and the ``Crips'' in order to detail the harsh realities of their world. While crimes are recounted as a normal part of this type of reportage, the pain and anguish of these African-American youths also are vividly portrayed. The only world they know is rife with violence and abuse. Bing has truly captured the language and essence of the gangs and their tightly knit structure. This is a powerful account that reads very much like a chilling novel. --Pat Royal, Crossland High School, Camp Springs, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Unprecedented, in-your-face report on L.A. street gangs. The grim world that fashion-model-turned-journalist Bing (Harper's, L.A. Weekly) limns here has little of the romance of such Hollywood variants as Colors; in fact, as G-roc, Bing's main informant, says, ``That movie just made up a lotta bullshit.'' Here, instead, the portrait is down and dirty and true as Bing lets gang members speak for themselves and at length, weaving their stories together with a lively scene-setting narrative that reveals her deep caring for these violent youths. Bing alternates interviews with kids jailed at youth ``camps,'' and later at Soledad Prison, with ones drawn from the mean streets of South Central L.A., and sifts into the stories a history of the gangs (begun in the late 1960's by one Raymond Washington, who organized ``a little gang of kids'' at Fremont High School that metastasized into today's sprawling cancer of 37 Blood ``sets'' and 57 Crip sets --Bloods and Crips being deadly enemies--with membership numbering in the many thousands). While the testimonies Bing elicits are always fascinating--shocking in their embrace of violence (asked for good reasons to kill, gang members answer, ``For the way he walk''; ``Cause he called me a baboon--dis' me''; ``Cause he fucked up my hair in the barbershop'') and frightening for the deep alienation they reveal--they exhibit a cumulatively numbing sameness. However, Bing's climactic interview, with imprisoned legendary ``gangbanger'' Monster Kody, provocatively freshens the text as Kody's highly political words (``My real enemy--The United States Government. That's who controls the Crips, the Bloods, and me'') indicate that today's gang member may be tomorrow's radical. Sobering, noteworthy dispatches from a urban inferno that's so without pity as to prompt one of Bing's subjects, age 17, to conclude, ``I tell you this--you seen enough dyin', then you ready to die yourself, just so you don't have to see no more of death.''
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by School Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
