SOURCE: "Death at an Early Age," in The New York Times Book Review, October 22, 1995, p. 28.

[Below, Frey reviews Drive-By and Uprising: Crips and Bloods Tell the Story of America's Youth in the Crossfire.]

On a sultry July night in 1990, in the projects of East Oakland, Calif., five teen-age boys and girls stood beneath a streetlight—talking, flirting, passing the time. Around the corner came an old green sedan. As it sped past the group, someone leaned out the window with a 45-caliber semiautomatic pistol and opened fire into the group. Two of the young people were wounded. A third, 13-year-old Kevin Reed, was shot in the groin and bled to death on the sidewalk that night. Two days later, The Oakland Tribune ran a story on the shooting. Even so, the particulars of Kevin's life—who he was, what he dreamed of becoming—quickly faded amid the general...