"Monster" Kody Scott, who here tells his electrifying life story: an angry, stunningly violent odyssey through gang warfare and prison to redemption. The acknowledgements page reveals Scott's continued wrath: Bullet-proof love is extended to Muhammad Abdullah and the Islamic Liberation Army...Teflon bullets are sent to the sell-outs. Scott is still fighting, only now for the New Afrikan Independence Movement, dedicated to creating a separate black nation. But, then, the author has always been at war: Drafted at age 11 into a set of the ghastly gang army of the L.A. Crips--an army of children gone wild in a concrete jungle--he shot his first man, a rival Blood, that same year, and for the next 15 years led a life spent defending his set by word, fist, and bullet: I liked to see the buckshot eat away their clothing, almost like piranha fish. Much of Scott's memoir is a horrifying chronicle of gang combat--shootings, betrayals, retaliations (Scott was shot six times in one ambush)--almost tedious in its unrelenting machismo and bloodshed, made palatable mostly by the author's deep knowledge of gang lore. Eventually, jail stints punctuate the street fighting; finally, in 1983, Scott, behind bars, meets a radical Muslim who teaches him that the real battle is with the white oppressors--a lesson that takes hold in the late 80's in Folsom Prison, where, amid outrageous depravity, Scott renounces gangsterism to embrace his new struggle. Today, Scott, 29, is back in prison, serving seven years for a healthy beating he gave to an unrepentant crack dealer. A savage document of the street that gives, and asks, no quarter. Anyone who wants to know why L.A. burned will find the chilling answer here.