Convicted in the Womb: One Man's Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew

I don't read systematically anymore. I just don't have time. I read poetry at home as a pacifier. I skim dozens of magazines at work and I flip through hooks as I frantically prepare for my weekly Second Opinion radio interviews.

One Second Opinion interview never came off because of a scheduling problem, but I devoured the book anyway: Convicted in the Womb: One Man's Journey From Prisoner to Peacemaker, by Carl Upchurch (Bantam). The author, the founder of the gang-truce movement, grew up in South Philadelphia in circumstances as harsh as can be imagined. His father was largely absent, and then was murdered when Upchurch was still a teen. His mother was malicious, and ran with gangsters and pimps. His uncle Joe, "the family hero," went to the electric chair for beating a liquor-store owner to death during a $2 robbery. Another uncle raped one of Upchurch's sisters.

Upchurch's book begins: "I was a nigger in the womb. Not just black. Not just male. A rigger." He intentionally jars the reader to good effect, but I grew weary of his repeated use of such terms as "niggerization," "deniggerization," and "anti-niggerization."

Yet his story gripped me all the way through. By the time he was five, Upchurch had witnessed more violence than most of us do in a lifetime. School was no refuge. He recalls the time his fourth-grade teacher assigned everyone to draw an American flag. Unfortunately for Upchurch, his classmates had taken all the white crayons so he used a yellow one instead. The teacher was not pleased. "She grew very angry," he writes. "She shoved me and yelled about how dumb I was to put yellow on the American flag. `People like you may not understand how important it is to put white on the flag, but we Americans do,"' she told him.

Upchurch soon despaired of school and joined up with a gang. His petty criminal activities landed him in various youth-detention centers over the years, but he would invariably return to his neighborhood gang. Once he was picked up for shoplifting and the police called his mother down to the station and asked her what they should do with him. "Fuck him, leave him in there," she said.

His criminal activity escalated to hardcore violence. In the introduction, he writes about a woman who had stolen heroin from a gang leader. The guy gave Upchurch $1,500 to kill her. "I took my .25 automatic, climbed in through her bedroom window, clamped...