Product Description: "It was over 20 years ago that the book Monster: The autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member exploded on the scene and gave us all a front row seat to explore the genocidal brutality of the neo-colonial world of gangbanging. A world that exists at the expense of New Afrikan communities and New Afrikan youth in particular, through our social savage way of attempting to gain power through AKs, bats and beat downs ...read more

The follow up to his best-selling memoir Monster, Sanyika Shakur’s T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. is a vicious, heart-wrenching and true-to-life novel about an LA gang member that masterfully captures the violence and depravity of gang life. Shakur’s protagonist is Lapeace, the leader of the Eight Tray Crips gang in South Central Los Angeles. In a deadly gunfight with Anyhow, a Blood and Lapeace’s rival since childhood, eight innocent civilians are killed. Anyhow is captured. Lapeace becomes a fugitive and he must hide out in the home of his girlfriend, Tashima, a hip-hop mogul as a pair of crooked LA detectives, John Sweeney and Jesse Mendoza, attempt to track him down.This novel was written from the confines of Shakur’s jail cell, and the authenticity of its street scenes--the relentlessness of 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. With T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E., Shakur delivers a powerful and gripping story about the terror of gang life and one man’s attempt to free himself.

The author's memoir of life sixteen years as a gang member in the Los Angeles Crips chronicles his brutal rise within the organization as well as his subsequent jail term and his political and personal transformation into an anti-gang crusader. Reprint.