Fist, stick, knife, gun: a personal history of violence in America

by Geoffrey Canada.
Boston: Beacon Press, c.1995.

Through shattering storytelling, Geoffrey Canada recreates his childhood world, one in which the “sidewalk” boys learned the codes of the block from their elders and were ranked – and to some degree protected – through the rituals of fist, stick, and knife. He gives a cogent, chilling analysis of how, through an unforeseen chain of consequences set in motion in the 1960s by New York Governor Rockefeller’s drug laws, everything changed on the streets.

New 2010 edition titled Fist, Stick, Knife and Gun is available from the Sno-Isle Libraries