"You got to have gangs. You got to run…. The way the street is you got to have gangs. You by yourself, man, you got no chance. On the streets, it's the gangs what do the talking…. How else you going to go about your business without being cut or stomped out?" The speaker is Justin Dye; "headman" of the Nomads, a black street gang in Kin Platt's taut and very tough novel ["Headman"] about growing up dead in the white, black and Chicano ghettos of Los Angeles. Platt's book isn't about Justin; it's about Owen Kirby, a young white slum-dweller who knows that Justin's way is the only way….

[Unreality never] creeps into "Headman," which is as direct as a hammer-blow. The language of "Headman," by the way, is the language of the streets, with hardly a four-letter word omitted. Obscenities abound in Owen Kirby's world, but...