T.h.u.g. L.i.f.e. - 9780802118714

Published fourteen years ago, Sanyika Shakur's classic memoir of gang life, Monster, was a best-seller and now has over four hundred thousand copies in print in the United States alone. With T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E, his fiction debut, Shakur has delivered a novel that describes, in the same remarkable detail he employed in Monster, the life of an L.A. gang member, and the violent, consuming, and lavish life of the gangster world.
Shakur's protagonist, Lapeace, is the leader of the Eight Tray Crips gang in South Central Los Angeles. He holds no prisoners on the Compton streets, which are riddled with rivalrous gangs looking for revenge. In a deadly gunfight with Anyhow, a Blood, and Lapeace's rival since childhood, eight innocent civilians are killed. Anyhow is captured and Lapeace becomes a fugitive, hiding out in the home of his girlfriend, Tashima, a hip-hop mogul, while a pair of crooked L.A. detectives, John Sweeney and Jesse Mendoza, attempt to track him down. The novel explores Sweeney and Mendoza's maneuvering of the intricate gang network, employing informants on both sides of the fight to get at the secluded Lapeace. It also reveals the psychology of the gang member, and in particular, Lapeace's attempts to uncover his roots and somehow disentangle himself from his violent past.
This novel, like the autobiography before it, was written from the confines of Shakur's jail cell, and the authenticity of its street scenes - the relentless violence, the do-or-die attitude of each side of the gang war, the sheer joy in the killing - is a testament to the hell that has been a majority of Shakur's life. He was christened a gang member at age eleven, and has spent most of his life either running from the law or in jail. With Monster, Shakur announced to the world a side of himself not before seen; with T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. he follows with an equally compelling story about the terror of gang life and one man's attempt to free himself.