Gang life is both the starting point and the dark side of the American dream. Ethnic groups and immigrants have long turned to gangs for protection and support when it was offered nowhere else. From the Five Points to South Central L.A., Bowery Boys to Bloods and Crips, the James gang to gangsta rap, gangs offer a largely urban version of the American frontier: an opportunity and a refuge for societys outlaws, outcasts, and outsiders. Featuring writing drawn from fiction, nonfiction, and journalism, Gangs takes the reader on a tour of this underground, from accounts of New Yorks violent past by Herbert Asbury (The Gangs of New York) and Mark Helprin (A Winters Tale) to Hunter S. Thompsons report from within the Hells Angels and T.J. English inside Americas most notorious Vietnamese gang. Other selections bring readers into the Irish, Italian, and Jewish Mobs as well as the Triads of Americas Chinatowns, and chart the role of the vicious drug trade in contemporary gang life.