GANGSTERS: Fifty Years of Madness, Drugs, and Death on The Streets of America.
by Lewis Yablonsky
March l, l997. 227 p.
New York University Press.
$17.95 Paperback
Gangsters: Fifty Years of Madness, Drugs, and Death on the Streets
of America, by Lewis Yablonsky
American Library Associationės BOOKLIST
Review of GANGSTERS March l, l997
Those who work with gangsters are apt to be absorbed by Yablonsky's
account of his career in this field. Part memoir, part sociology, his story hooks
readers from the start with anecdotes of his own teenage encounters with gangs in
Newark; and tame those, days seem compared with the contemporary urban gang and its
hallmark of cold hyperviolence Yablonsky has investigated gangs from the West Side
Story era through the present and supplies many quotations from gangsters that illustrates
the. reasons boys join as "Wannabees," earn some rep" through murder,
and. if they survive into their late 20s, become 'OGs" (old gangsters).
This survey of sociopathology is not unremittingly grim, however, Yablonsky describes
strategies for tamping down gang violence and socializing gangsters, such as attaching
an intermediary to a gang, acting out a "Psychodrama" that encourages young
men to express their rage nonlethally, and creating"therapeutic communities"
as an alternative to prison. A few success stories that Yablonsky recounts encourage
hope, and perhaps new entrants to the criminology profession.
Gilbert Taylor
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