The Truce: Lessons from an L.A. Gang War

This ethnography of a gang war in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Oakwood, just blocks from the famed Venice Beach boardwalk, provides a rare eyewitness account of the urban violence pervasive in the recent history of the United States. With seventeen people killed and more than fifty injured, the hostilities over ten months in 1993 and 1994 marked the peak of gang violence in the history of Los Angeles, a city once labeled the "gang capital of the nation." The conflict began as a quarrel a...