Michael Connelly - Fair Warning
Usually love his books but this was boring, cliched plot and uninterested plot.
Michael Connelly - Fair Warning
Usually love his books but this was boring, cliched plot and uninterested plot.
I did a search of this thread for "gang leader" to see if this has been mentioned, and nothing came up. If it has, my apologies.
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets was one of the books recommended by John Hearne during his recent webinar (which was excellent). https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ne-recommended!
I'm about 2/3 of the way through and it's utterly captivating. It's sociology -- I took a lot of sociology courses in college, came close to doing a master's in sociology, and like good sociology -- but even if sociology isn't your bag this book has all the elements of a great novel and it's hard to put down each night. Rather than reinvent the wheel, here's the description from Goodreads and below that the link.
https://www.amazon.com/Gang-Leader-D...dp/B0011UCPQ0/The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh managed to gain entrée into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment.
When Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects, he was looking for people to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty. A first-year grad student, he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of the next decade inside the projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there.
Over the next seven years, Venkatesh observed JT and the rest of the gang as they operated their crack selling business, conducted PR within their community, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang's complex organizational structure.
Gang Leader for a Day is an inside view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in an urban war zone. It is also the story of a complicated friendship between two young and ambitious men, a universe apart.
https://www.amazon.com/Worth-Defendi...dp/B08P86BR9R/
Description from Amazon:
"Richard Bresler was Rorion Gracie's first student in LA, and is widely recognized as the first student of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in the USA. His memoir, WORTH DEFENDING, chronicles his over 40 years' involvement with the Gracie family and Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, including the almost 20 years he spent working closely alongside Rorion helping to grow Jiu-Jitsu through the "Gracie Garages" (the first of which was in the house that Richard and Rorion shared in Hermosa Beach, CA), the founding of the Gracie Academy (made possible by a loan Richard made to Rorion), and the inception of the UFC (in which Richard invested and at which he was ringside with Hélio Gracie himself). Read the story of the birth of modern MMA from someone who was there every step of the way!"
I loved this book. Well written and fascinating history of Gracie BJJ, and early MMA/UFC. Highly recommend
The best primer on Antifa I've found to date.
I just finished this: https://www.amazon.com/Unmasking-Ant...dp/B08M8DRZJZ/... and recommend it highly.
"We are the domestic pets of a human zoo we call civilization."
Laurence Gonzales - "Deep Survival."
I've been slowly working through the Milan Jacovich series by Les Roberts. Pepper Pike is the first one.
It's a decent hardboiled PI series. It's set in Cleveland, which interests me because I lived there for several years. Roberts fictionalized the place where the protagonist lives, but it feels right and I lived, for a time, a few blocks from there. The early ones brought back memories of the Flats being a six-county asshole magnet.
I'm up to The Cleveland Creep, the fifteenth book. I'm not binge-reading them (after the first few), because book series usually are written over time and I think that reading them close together sort of lessens the fun of reading them.
If we have to march off into the next world, let us walk there on the bodies of our enemies.
Girl Waits With Gun, a historical novel (well-rooted in fact). The heroine of the book was, in fact, a deputy sheriff in New Jersey, a job she got because of her fearlessness and doggedness in pursuing the case of a rich thug who was terrorizing her family.
The cover is interesting:
My quibble is that almost all of the old photos I've seen of people holding guns, their fingers are almost always on the triggers.
If we have to march off into the next world, let us walk there on the bodies of our enemies.
@Bio
@feudist
@Coyotesfan97
I picked up "Ill Made Knight" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GU2TIZU/ and read the first quarter in one sitting. I'm enjoying it quite a bit. It's written in a fairly simple manner that compliments the story and really lets the narrator's character shine through. I'm sure I'll pick up more of the series.
I also read Bill Bryson's "Road to Little Dribbling" https://www.amazon.com/Road-Little-D...=2KCDD862DTJC5 and it was easily the least enjoyable Bryson book I've read to date. The cranky old man routine wore thin early on, and while there are some genuinely funny and informative sections of the book it was a lot of slogging through "curmudgeon laments how much better things use to be" passages to get to them. There was also not much cohesion or theme. It seems like a book he didn't really want to write, like an agent's idea he felt obligated to do or a contract fulfillment more then the seemingly real enjoyment of the writing his other works I've read have had.
Sorta around sometimes for some of your shitty mod needs.