White American youth My descent into America's most violent hate movement -- and how I got out

The music came from a mail-order service called Romantic Violence. It was for "white people with guts." Picciolini, then a punk rock kid in Chicago struggling against the assimilationist dreams of his immigrant Italian parents, was hooked. He soon learned that skinhead trappings - Doc Martens, the skinny suspenders known as braces, Nazi insignias - made people automatically fear him, and he got hooked on that, too. Picciolini became an enterprising disciple. He shoplifted, and read, a copy of the only book he could find on skinheads. He diligently photocopied and disseminated racist literature. When his mentor went to prison, Picciolini was ready to step in, ultimately fronting Final Solution, one of the first American neo-Nazi bands to play in Europe. He got expelled from school multiple times, once after beating a black kid who refused to move and hurling racial epithets at the principal. He presided over street fights and began to stockpile weapons for the race war he believed was looming. He also grew up: He got married, had two sons and opened a record store that sold some white supremacist music, but also attracted anti-racist and nonwhite customers who turned out to be real human beings. A friend, a fellow band frontman and father, was killed in a fight. Picciolini began to realize that the movement was no longer for him. But in the end, there is something unsatisfying about this redemption checklist. In Christian Picciolini's story, the only character is Christian Picciolini. We don't hear from anyone he hurt - other than a chance encounter with the former security guard at his high school, to whom he apologizes, he does not seek any of them out. By this time his wife has left him, and though Picciolini worries about what his new girlfriend, who "saw beyond my mistakes to the man I had become," will have to say about his old tattoos, we don't actually find out. When a tragedy befalls his family, Picciolini goes so far as to wonder if it isn't divine payback for his own mistakes.