Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gripping read and insightful analysis, 29 Aug 2008
This is a fantastically well-written insight in to Britain's gangs. Heale has conducted some fascinating (and frankly extremely brave) interviews with those figures at the heart of gang culture. This could have been written simply as a chapter-by-chapter account of these interviews, but Heale's novelistic style makes this a truly gripping, and at times traumatic, read. One Blood could also have sensationalised Britain's gangs, but it provides a very real, intelligent and mature account of gang life and an intriguing analysis of the problems associated with it. Indeed, it is often the casual and arbitrary nature of violence in this chaotic world that will shock the reader most of all.
Having finished the book, your perceptions of gang culture and the solutions to its problems will be turned on their head. Society appears to be misinterpreting the very nature of 'gangs' and until we understand that it is often the chaos, rather than order, of gang life that is feeding violence, the situation can only get worse. Heale has the courage to offer solutions but I suspect that his greatest contribution will be to bring greater awareness and understanding of this anarchic world.
Heale is a very talented writer and as a work of non-fiction alone this would have been a staggeringly good read. That it is non-fiction makes One Blood an extremely important book on a subject that has become one of the biggest issues in Britain today.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding - a very important book, 9 Sep 2008
This is the first modern commentary I've read on gangs and gang culture which refuses to slip into the hand-wringing clichés of race, absentee fathers or video game violence. What Heale presents us instead is a balanced - and brilliant - presentation of the psychological, societal and economic factors which contribute to a young person's entry into this much-misunderstood culture.
Most of the research presented is based on face-to-face interviews, and what comes across most clearly is the variety of people who exist in these criminal micro-societies; from the intelligent, eloquent "faces" (bosses) to the ambitious, bright kids, Heale constantly undermines the lazy prejudices which lead us to imagine all gang members as angry, uneducated children (although many are).
Heale carries us along at quite a pace, but also emphasizes the telling detail; details which while undeniably shocking, never slip into glamourisation of the subject matter. All in all, this book presents a significant step forward in the general debate on gangs - what they are and what, if anything, we can do about them. I would recommend it to any person seeking to understand more about Britain's gang culture.
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Opportunity Missed , 24 Sep 2008
This could have been a dazzling, grab-readers by the throat and force mainstream society to face hard realities to bring about real change, sort of a book. Heale has done all the hard - and often very dangerous - work; painstaking, on the street research in extremely tough areas, interviews with police, politicians and community leaders, and exhaustive background reading.
Unfortunately, Heale is incapable of wearing this research lightly. Instead of making his points through powerful examples with a deft commentary to tease out the ideas and conclusions, he likes to tell, tell, tell himself. The result is a book with far too much tedious, often unfocused, theorising. Heale's claim that it is 'written in the style of a novel' is laughable. Three quarters of it clunks along as if it was produced by a graduate student completing an MA on Gang Culture in Modern British Teenagers, packed with plodding academic phrases like: 'To understand why, one must' , 'As we've already established', 'It is worth dwelling...','This leads us to the issue of ...' etc etc.
There are a few moments where Heale shines. The start of chapter three when he describes a South London gang member gearing himself up for a killing is startling. Sadly, it is all too short.
This is still a book worth reading, and its ultimate conclusion about the chaos that underpins gang culture is undoubtedly true and important. But, alas, One Blood falls well short of the truly society changing work it had the potential to be.
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