Skinheads Shaved For Battle

Moore emphasizes throughout the American identity of skinheadism.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days, this narrative nonfiction classic documents the rising inequality and cultural alienation that presaged the crises of today. “A status report on the American Dream [that] gets its power [from] the unpredictable, rich specifics of people’s lives.”—Time “[William] Finnegan’s real achievement is to attach identities to the steady stream of faceless statistics that tell us America’s social problems are more serious than we want to believe.”—The Washington Post A fifteen-year-old drug dealer in blighted New Haven, Connecticut; a sleepy Texas town transformed by crack; Mexican American teenagers in Washington State, unable to relate to their immigrant parents and trying to find an identity in gangs; jobless young white supremacists in a downwardly mobile L.A. suburb. William Finnegan spent years embedded with families in four communities across the country to become an intimate observer of the lives he reveals in Cold New World. What emerges from these beautifully rendered portraits is a prescient and compassionate book that never loses sight of its subjects’ humanity. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST NONFICTION SELECTION Praise for Cold New World “Unlike most journalists who drop in for a quick interview and fly back out again, Finnegan spent many weeks with families in each community over a period of several years, enough time to distinguish between the kind of short-term problems that can beset anyone and the longer-term systemic poverty and social disintegration that can pound an entire generation into a groove of despair.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “The most remarkable of William Finnegan’s many literary gifts is his compassion. Not the fact of it, which we have a right to expect from any personal reporting about the oppressed, but its coolness, its clarity, its ductile strength. . . . Finnegan writes like a dream. His prose is unfailingly lucid, graceful, and specific, his characterization effortless, and the pull of his narrative pure seduction.”—The Village Voice “Four astonishingly intimate and evocative portraits. . . . All of these stories are vividly, honestly and compassionately told. . . . While Cold New World may make us look in new ways at our young people, perhaps its real goal is to make us look at ourselves.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Despite the fact that the Ku Klux Klan can be traced from the 1700s through the Civil War and is going strong in the present day, many people fail to realize the reach and influence of the group. Many scholars, for instance, perceive the KKK as a radical racist group composed primarily of ignorant, uneducated members, when it is actually much more. Some Klan groups are political, while others are simply social. Some meet and eat just as any other mainstream civic or church group, but others are focused toward the use of well-planned violence. Not all Klan groups advocate an overthrow of the U.S. government, though some do. The author traces the historical development of the Klan, addressing its organization, membership, ideologies and philosophies. Avoiding the bias of previous works--written by either Klan apologists or detractors--the author chronicles the directions the group has taken during its long and diverse history. The study also details the secret oaths of allegiance, the Imperial Wizards, and the concept of Knighthood. The result is an accurate account of the Ku Klux Klan, a group that has continued to grow and evolve in response to changing times.

This book provides a fascinating examination of one of the most notorious countercultures in the United States. Skinheads: A Guide to An American Subculture is an insider's look at the history of skinheads in the United States, from their emergence from the U.S. hardcore underground in the 1980s in New York City, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, to the current scene that thrives in many major metropolitan areas today. What makes this revelatory book so compelling is its one-of-a-kind view of skinhead culture from the inside out. Coauthor Perry Hardy is a skinhead, bass player for the band, The Templars, and veteran member of the American skinhead scene since the onset of the movement. Based on his experiences, plus interviews with dozens of skinheads of all kinds, Skinheads draws back the curtain to reveal a world that more often is simply a haven for those disaffected from society, rather than a subculture of hatred or violence.

Whether people want to play games and download music, engage in social networking and professional collaboration, or view pornography and incite terror, the Internet provides myriad opportunities for people who share common interests to find each other. The contributors to this book argue that these self-selected online groups are best understood as tribes, with many of the same ramifications, both positive and negative, that tribalism has in the non-cyber world. In Electronic Tribes, the authors of sixteen competitively selected essays provide an up-to-the-minute look at the social uses and occasional abuses of online communication in the new media era. They explore many current Internet subcultures, including MySpace.com, craftster.org, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, music downloading, white supremacist and other counterculture groups, and Nigerian e-mail scams. Their research raises compelling questions and some remarkable answers about the real-life social consequences of participating in electronic tribes. Collectively, the contributors to this book capture a profound shift in the way people connect, as communities formed by geographical proximity are giving way to communities—both online and offline—formed around ideas.

Russia’s Skinheads: Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives provides a thorough examination of the phenomenon of skinheads, explaining its nature and its significance, and assessing how far Russian skinhead subculture is the ‘lumpen’ end of the extreme nationalist ideological spectrum. There are large numbers of skinheads in Russia, responsible for a significant number of xenophobic attacks, including 97 deaths in 2008 alone, making this book relevant to Russian specialists as well as to sociologists of youth subculture. It provides a practical example of how to investigate youth subculture in depth over an extended period – in this case through empirical research following a specific group over six years – and goes on to argue that Russian skinhead subculture is not a direct import from the West, and that youth cultural practices should not be reduced to expressions of consumer choice. It presents an understanding of the Russian skinhead as a product of individuals’ whole, and evolving, lives, and thereby compels sociologists to rethink how they conceive the nature of subcultures.