"Gangs", Ross Kemp
Okay, so first thing's first. Ross Kemp is not a writer, or even a journalist. He's an actor and - let's be blunt - an actor whose career has been based largely on him being a big-ass skinhead with a convincing Cockney accent. I wasn't expecting Pulitzer writing, and I didn't get it. The writing's tidy enough - I may have Kemp to thank, for being a reasonably effective and restrained communicator, or maybe a skilled and disciplined editor - and easy to read, but you won't pick this book up because of Kemp's mastery of the prose form. That said, I enjoyed this book enormously and urge you to read it.
Gangs was a curious TV show, and it's a curious book. Kemp explains that it was inspired by a stint of filming in a gang-afflicted area in the states, which triggered an interest in the subject. He sets out to answer questions about the gang phenomenon: is the gang problem rowing, globally? Is there a general cause? How do gangs form? Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, he basically fails in these goals. In spite of the introduction, Gangs is neither a sociological study nor a journalistic investigation.
What it is, however, is at least as valuable as either of those, and probably more so than both. Kemp explains from the outset that, as an actor, he's more interested in people's behaviour from a personal and empathic perspective than he is in an analytical or contextual way, and so that's what he's going to deliver; and he does so in spades. Gangs is a thoughtful, balanced and sympathetic description of the lives, struggles and beliefs of gang-members in some of the most dangerous and violent places in the world. I've seen the subject matter touched on several times before, in various ways, but this is easily the most far-reaching, and the most personal I've encountered.
I was worried there might be a lot of machismo - gangs and violence are fairly macho subjects, and Kemp's a big Essex boy whose acting career has repeatedly involved him playing big hard bastards - but there's no more than a hint of it. He's honest enough to admit to being thoroughly out of his league when surrounded by machine-gun-toting druggie kids, which is just as well, as you'd have absolutely no time for him otherwise. That said, it must have taken spectacular balls to do what he did. Much of the time he's away from support, unarmed and unarmoured (after being told by one of his escorts that gang members would shoot him in his armour just to see if it worked), surrounded by unbelievably violent, unstable people with no reason to be afraid of reprisal. The moment when he asks the genuinely psychotic leader of a South African prison gang - who has murdered a warden just to join the gang, and again to stay in prison so that he could retain his position of influence - if sleeping with men makes him gay, I would have sworn he was going to die then and there.
But for the most part, what interests Kemp is why the people he's talking to do what they do. How did they get into the gang? Why do they kill members of enemy gangs? Do they hope to get out of the situations they're in? And between calm, uncushioned descriptions of murder, rape, torture and mutilation, he gives heart-breaking stories of the poverty, desperation and dignity of the people he's studying. Not that he's above a little judgment; he really doesn't like the Russian neo-Nazis at all, characterising them as posturing idiots, but even then he focusses on one of the more incongruous members, a young Tajik woman, and uncovers the slightly sad illusion she's been influenced into accepting that led her to join the gang.
The book wraps up with a slightly weak conclusion: that the gang problem globally is on the increase (with only scant anecdotal evidence to back it up, mostly not even from the body of the book), and that the problem is worst where the gap between the poorest and richest members of society is widest (which is a little trite, and again only backed up by personal observation), but it can be readily ignored without taking anything away from the book. If you want to see what gang life is like - real, machine-guns-and-drugs gang life, not the "Sharks vs. Jets with slightly less Brylcreem" version you tend to see - and see it through eyes that are in equal parts critical of and sympathetic to the subject, then this isn't a bad place to look.