Product Description

Across the world millions of people are members of street gangs. In groups they fight, stab, rob, rape and murder anyone who isn’t one of their own. And when rival gangs meet – what you get is warfare. Ross Kemp infiltrates these groups of criminals to discover who they are, what makes them tick and what the law is doing to curb their criminal activity. On his harrowing journey he: • meets murderous members of the Number gang in Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town • crosses paths with Maori criminals in New Zealand • gets shot at in Rio • is set on fire as an initiation test for Russian Neo-Nazis Ross Kemp manages to get close to the world’s most violent street gangs: he’s streetwise enough to earn their trust and get them to confide their innermost secrets. It’s a wild ride – and not for the faint hearted.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102678 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

About the Author
Born in Essex in 1964, Ross Kemp is best known for his portrayal of Grant Mitchell in EastEnders. His father was a senior detective with the Metropolitan Police force, and as a result crime has always fascinated Kemp. Ross Kemp on Gangs is an award-winning series on Sky One.

Customer Reviews

Must buy.
If you love the series you will love this book truely amazing. Just recieved it today and can't put it down.Many things in it that you did not see on the tv program.

Excellent read
This book was really interesting, I couldn't put it down!
Although gorey at times it was weird to think that this stuff actually happens all the time.
Definately worth buying this book! Ross Kemp was lucky to survive what he went through with the people he met!

Not Quite What It Sets Out To Be
Well, I suppose the big beardy Anglophile yank had to do it sooner or later.

As Bryson himself says in his introduction, the world doesn't really need another book on Shakespeare. From the incredibly specific and obscure to the uselessly vague and general, from the trivially lightweight to the inaccessibly somber, the Bard of Stratford is the subject of literally dozens of new books of facts, biography, analysis, opinion, theory and conjecture, every damn year.

For all that, this was a worthwhile book to have written, which is more or less all we'd expect of Bryson, who is a clear, clever and witty writer who rarely fails to please.

Bryson has chosen biography as his goal. The book is written in more or less chronological order, with chapters covering distinct periods in Will's life. Bryson starts by characterising the period, analysing the (usually scant) evidence available, then raising and scrutinising the various popular interpretations about what is known. He detours occasionally into anecdotal discussion about his researches or funny or impressive stories about other people's attempts at research, which all over helps it from getting too dry and to remain a very Bryson book.

Throughout he's diligent about the distinction between evidence and interpretation. The problem is, we actually have pretty slender information about Shakespeare's life: a veritable wealth of data by the standards of Elizabethans in general, but still very little from which to derive any reliable idea of the facts of his life. Inevitably, this means foraying into conjecture from time to time; a practice at which Shakespearean academe excels, but a dangerous one. Bryson gives an example of the famous deer-poaching incident, a romantic guess made in the eighteenth century that was repeated as solid fact in Shakespeare scholarship for more than a hundred years after. Bryson, by contrast, while happy to include reasonable and useful guesses as to how to interpret what is known, is very careful to let you know what's fact - and where it's from - and what's conjecture and how it was arrived at.

If you're seriously into your Shakespeare scholarship, this book probably doesn't have anything new to tell you (although Bryson's research is up to date, and he has access to facts I didn't have at Uni), but if you're only likely to buy one Shakespeare biography in your life, this isn't a bad one to choose.