By turns harrowing, moving, and ultimately redemptive, this is a
war story -- a war that rages out of control on the streets of the
United States, claiming the lives of our loved ones and neighbors.
In this memoir, complete with child soldiers, unspeakable violence,
and eventual salvation, we witness the journey of an East Coast
member of the notorious Bloods gang coming to terms with the lost
boy he was and the transformation into the man he wants to become.
Unlike the child warriors of Mozambique and Sierra Leone, gang
members and the wars they wage are the United States' homegrown
nightmare. Lacking protection, support, or any alternatives,
Dashaun Morris is forced into battle for the first time at age
eleven, in the streets of Phoenix, when a friend's older brothers
put him in a car filled with 40s and weed smoke, put a gun in his
hands, then make him point it at the men on the corner and squeeze
the trigger. The targets are Crips, of course, and, as Morris
writes, "In the darkness of the streets, my childhood is
murdered.... I am reborn -- a gangster." In this haunting, violent
memoir, Morris takes us through an American childhood turned
grotesquely inside out. In the fourth grade, he loses his first
friend in a drive-by shooting. By high school he is the man, a
champion on the football field by day and a reputable banger on his
'hood turf by night. Living the life of a gang banger, Morris does
it all -- drug dealing, jacking, and continuing the aimless war
with rival gang members -- almost opening fire one night on a close
friend, a cheerleader, as she hangs out with young men he mistakes
for Crips. He eventually makes it to college on a football
scholarship, but on the verge of being drafted by the NFL, Morris
can't escape his gang-banging mentality and gets caught up in
crimes that snatch away all future hopes. Sitting in a prison cell,
he anticipates the birth of his first child while counting the
friends he's buried. War of the Bloods in My Veins is part of
Morris's redemption, a cry to his brothers that gang life is mental
illness. It is a rare and brutally honest look into the relentless
storm of abandonment, violence, crime, death, and the endless rush
toward the complete and utter self-annihilation that plagues the
lives of the young "soldiers" who die every day in our streets.
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