The Truce: Lessons from an L.A. Gang War. By Karen Umemoto. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 232p. $57.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

The Truce, by Karen Umemoto, chronicles a gang war in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Oakwood that occurred between 1993 and 1994. Umemoto states that her “central concern” is “the relatively quick process through which rather harmonious social relations across racial boundaries are overcome by racial tensions and distancing, which set in place a more fractured pattern of race relations” (p. 5). The book, then, is primarily an analysis of the complex and changing dynamics of racial conflict, and the author uses the gang war to explore that conflict.