Synopses & Reviews
The effects of gang violence are witnessed every day on the streets, in the news, and on the movie screen. In all these forums, gangs of young adults are associated with drugs and violence. Yet what is it that prompts young people to participate in violent behavior? And what can be done to extract adolescents from the gangster world of crime, death, and incarceration once they have become involved?
In Gangsters: 50 Years of Madness, Drugs, and Death on the Streets of America, Lewis Yablonsky provides answers to the most baffling and crucial questions regarding gangs. Using information gathered from over forty years of experience working with gang members and based on hundreds of personal interviews, many conducted in prisons and in gang neighborhoods, Yablonsky explores the pathology of the gangsters' apparent addiction to incarceration and death.
Gangsters is divided into four parts, including a brief history of gangs, the characteristics of gangs, successful approaches for treating gangsters in prison and the community, and concluding with a review and analysis of notable behavioral and social scientific theories of gangs. While condemning their violent behavior in no uncertain terms, Yablonsky offers hope through his belief that, given a chance in an effective treatment program, youths trapped in violent behavior can change their lives in positive ways and, in turn, facilitate positive change in their communities and society at large.
Review
"The volume effectively challenges accepted notions of "race" and "racial equality" and considers the long-term effects of the struggle on its participants, tracing the development of African-American political thought since the 1960s." -Orlando Times,
Review
"Part memoir, part sociology, Yablonsky's story hooks readers from the start." -Booklist,
Review
"Yablonsky writes in an exceptionally readable idiom, frequently introducing autobiographical excerpts from his extensive files of working with gangs." -Choice,
Review
"Gangsters is the acme volume from the master of the genre... Yablonsky's acute clinical observations during decades of field work are here nicely integrated with selected theories of contemporary gangs." -Robert Merton,Columbia University
Synopsis
The Making of Martin Luther King and The Civil Rights Movement incorporates the changing focus of civil rights movement studies to focus on communities and leaders heretofore ignored or under-represented, and thereby challenges many of the agendas established by civil rights scholarship of the past twenty-five years. We learn from essays on communities in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Montgomery that key centers of black life, such as unions, schools, teachers, businessmen, and masonic lodges played important roles in the movement. We learn of the importance of influential local leaders such as W. H. Flowers in Arkansas and Edgar Daniel Nixon in Montgomery, who were tremendously effective at organizing on the local level.The volume also confronts paradigms of history such as the notion that the Civil Rights Movement can be traced from the reformist integration of King, to the revolutionary black nationalism of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Party. Clayborne Carson argues in a pathbreaking essay that there were radical undercurrents in mass black movements of the 1950s and early 60s, and that these undercurrents contained the seeds of the most significant mass movements of subsequent decades. In contrast, black power militancy of the late 1960's, according to Carson, was either readily suppressed or transformed into forms that did not threaten the dominant political and economic elites.
About the Author
Brian Ward is Lecturer in American History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Tony Badger is Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge.