Most people who have lived the kind of life that Jess Mowry did in his youth are in jail, dead, or are fated to a life of hardship and poverty. Yet Mowry, at age thirty-eight, has defied the odds to become both an accomplished author and a role model for the young black street kids whom he works with and writes about. Mowry is such a powerful, visceral writer that the editor of one of his books has likened him to Charles Dickens. The comparison is not far-fetched, for Mowry's talent and his gift for articulating the searing rage and frustrations of the black youth is nothing short of remarkable. According to Cathi Dunn MacRae of the Wilson Library Bulletin, the writer's "own life is so solidly enmeshed in his work that perhaps we need a new word for it. Such social commentary is actually `docufiction.'" In...