An Irish Catholic neighborhood of the 1960s on Chicagos Southside that nurtured camaraderie, religion and racial fury; the frequently illegal antics of teenaged boys; the broadening experiences of college and the Army; an assortment of jobs from brutally boring factory work, to business in foreign embassies, to fighting fires; people met and befriended from the super rich to inept Korean golfers who feared tigers; religion, and how confusing it can be.
One of the Guysexamines the causes, nature, and meaning of female gang involvement. Miller situates the study of female gang membership in the context of current directions in feminist scholarship and current research on both gangs and female criminal offenders. The body of the book draws on interviews from girls in two mid-sized midwestern cities with relatively new gang histories, St. Louis, Missouri and Columbus, Ohio. It discusses how and why girls join gangs, the nature of girls' involvement in gangs (including initiation rituals, gang rules, inter-gang-rivalries, and criminal activities), and how gang involvement shapes girls' participation in delinquency and their risk of victimization, as well as the ways their gender affects this experience.
In the second edition of this groundbreaking social history, M. Ann Hall begins with an important new chapter on Aboriginal women and early sport and ends with a new chapter tying today's trends and issues in Canadian women's sport to their origins in the past. Students will appreciate the more descriptive chapter titles and the restructuring of the book into easily digestible sections. Fifty-two images complement Hall's lively narrative.
New York Times bestseller: A novel of a messy mob war in Brooklyn that “makes you laugh out loud” (Chicago Sun-Times). Kid Sally Palumbo has been a loyal servant to the Brooklyn Mafia for years. His specialty is murder, and he is so skilled at it that he has gotten the attention of Mafia boss Papa Baccala. But unfortunately for Kid Sally, murder pays poorly. He wants to make real dough, to get respect, and to be able to tell his colleagues where to sit when they eat dinner. In short, he wants to be boss. The job would be his for the taking—if only Kid Sally weren’t a Grade A moron. To keep Sally from stirring up trouble, Baccala tosses him an easy assignment: Organize a bicycle race through Brooklyn, and keep the profits. Kid Sally bungles it, setting off a turf war that quickly engulfs the borough. The dimwitted mobsters are masters in the art of murder, and they are about to put on a show. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
Richard Price, Academy Award nominated screenwriter and mainstream author of The Wanderers says, "I read through [Lost Boys of the Bronx] in one sitting - It was GREAT!" Straight from the streets of the mid-1960s Bronx comes a book about one of the borough's most feared gangs - The Ducky Boys. While their unusual name alone might contradict their reputation, in the Norwood/Bainbridge section of the Bronx their appearances provoked an ominous dread. So much so, that when Richard Price needed inspiration for a terrifying gang in his novel (and later movie) The Wanderers, he knew exactly which gang to choose. Lost Boys of the Bronx tells the story of the Ducky Boys in their own words. It is a story of how a few pre-teen kids in the Botanical Gardens turned into a gang of hundreds - and a gang so alarming that rumors of their arrival would shut down local schools. This is also a study of the mostly Irish Bronx neighborhood in which the Ducky Boys were born, and where so many of the Ducky kids got caught up in the tumultuous times of the '60s where their fierce loyalty was the only thing that got them through. This is not your typical gang book. It neither praises nor demonizes the gang for the things they did, but rather simply reports what happened - warts and all. You'll see the truth behind the Ducky Boys' gang - their lives, their loves, their pranks and crimes, and so much more. To borrow from a particular product's slogan - with a name like the Ducky Boys, you knew they HAD to be tough.
Dead End Kids exposes both the depravity and the humanity in gang life through the eyes of a teenaged girl named Cara, a member of a Kansas City gang. In this shocking yet compassionate account, Mark Fleisher shows how gang girls’ lives are shaped by poverty, family disorganization, and parental neglect.
In Gus, Blain plays on every trope of the classic Western. Perfectly blending caricature and cinematic pacing, humor and high-octane action, he delivers an exuberant graphic novel ode to men and women chasing each other, and to the bonds of friendship that tie together three unforgettable cowboys.
While gangs and gang culture have been around for countless centuries, The Gang is one of the first academic studies of the phenomenon. Originally published in 1927, Frederic Milton Thrasher’s magnum opus offers a profound and careful analysis of hundreds of gangs in Chicago in the early part of the twentieth century. With rich prose and an eye for detail, Thrasher looked specifically at the way in which urban geography shaped gangs, and posited the thesis that neighborhoods in flux were more likely to produce gangs. Moreover, he traced gang culture back to feudal and medieval power systems and linked tribal ethos in other societies to codes of honor and glory found in American gangs. Thrasher approaches his subject with empathy and insightfulness, and creates a multifaceted and textured portrait that still has much to offer to readers today. With handsome images that evoke the era, this unabridged edition of The Gang not only explores an important moment in the history of Chicago, but also is itself a landmark in the history of sociology and subcultural theory.
Many people believe that gangs are made up of violent thugs who are in and out of jail, and who are hyper-masculine and heterosexual. Vanessa Panfil introduces us to a different world. Meet gay gang members - sometimes referred to in popular culture as "homo thugs" - whose gay identity complicates criminology's portrayal and representation of gangs, gang members, and gang life. In vivid detail, Panfil provides an in-depth understanding of how gay gang members construct and negotiate both masculine and gay identities through crime and gang membership. She draws from interviews with over 50 gay gang- and crime-involved young men in Columbus, Ohio, the majority of whom are men of color in their late teens and early twenties, as well as on-the-ground ethnographic fieldwork with men who are in gay, hybrid, and straight gangs. Panfil provides an eye-opening portrait of how even members of straight gangs are connected to a same-sex oriented underground world. Most of these young men still present a traditionally masculine persona and voice deeply-held affection for their fellow gang members. They also fight with their enemies, many of whom are in rival gay gangs. Most come from impoverished, 'rough' neighborhoods, and seek to defy negative stereotypes of gay and Black men as deadbeats, though sometimes through illegal activity. Some are still closeted to their fellow gang members and families, yet others fight to defend members of the gay community, even those who they deem to be "fags, " despite distaste for these flamboyant members of the community.
