Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets Author: Sudhir Venkatesh | Language: English | ISBN:
B0011UCPQ0 | Format: EPUB
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets Description
A New York Times Bestseller
Foreword by Stephen J. Dubner, coauthor of Freakonomics When first-year graduate student Sudhir Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago’s most notorious housing projects, he hoped to find a few people willing to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty--and impress his professors with his boldness. He never imagined that as a result of this assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade embedded inside the projects under JT’s protection. From a privileged position of unprecedented access, Venkatesh observed JT and the rest of his gang as they operated their crack-selling business, made peace with their neighbors, evaded the law, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang’s complex hierarchical structure. Examining the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, and often corrupt struggle to survive in an urban war zone,
Gang Leader for a Day also tells the story of the complicated friendship that develops between Venkatesh and JT--two young and ambitious men a universe apart.
"Riveting." --The New York Times "
Compelling... dramatic... Venkatesh gives readers a window into a way of life that few Americans understand." --
Newsweek "
An eye-opening account into an underserved city within the city." --
Chicago Tribune"The achievement of Gang Leader for a Day is to give the dry statistics a raw, beating heart." --
The Boston Globe "
A rich portrait of the urban poor, drawn not from statistics but from viivd tales of their lives and his, and how they intertwined." --
The Economist "A
sensative, sympathetic, unpatronizing portrayal of lives that are ususally ignored or lumped into ill-defined stereotype." --
Finanical Times Sudhir Venkatesh’s latest book
Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy--a memoir of sociological investigation revealing the true face of America’s most diverse city--was published in September 2013 by The Penguin Press
- File Size: 514 KB
- Print Length: 332 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1594201501
- Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (January 10, 2008)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0011UCPQ0
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,660 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #7
in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > Midwest - #9
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists - #22
in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists
- #7
in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > Midwest - #9
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists - #22
in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists
This book is definitely an interesting read, particularly if you are not from the wrong side of the tracks. For most middle and upper class readers, I believe this is an insightful and voyueristic view of the lives that are so often forgotten about in this country.
Having grown up on the wrong side of the tracks and having lived in the projects for a time, I found myself deeply conflicted by the author's portrayal of others and himself. In the end he is only somewhat honest with himself about being the biggest hustler of all in the book. How exactly do you eat people's food and sit on their couches and follow them around for six years and in the end say you weren't even friends? Is this simply artificial distance inserted to make himself seem more scholarly, or does he really feel this way about the people who greatly contributed to his career? He tries to distinguish himself from the very people he interacted with and at times participated in morally questionable behavior with by describing himself as dressing appropriately for an Ivy League professor while returning to visit the ghetto. This description of himself at the end of the book brought home sharply to me the reality that most people will take a look at this world, like the author, and then put it down and walk away from the very real needs that real Americans have and it left me frustrated and angry. For every person who makes it out, there are hundreds left behind and most people are unwilling or unable to do anything except close a book and forget. I highly question that anything will be done as a result of this work to significantly improve impoverished Americans' situations, a view that the author confirms.
Thus Reggie, a Chicago gang member, warned the author of this book. Thank goodness, Venkatesh wasn't frightened away, and the consequence is this narrative about a Chicago crack-dealing gang.
I first learned something about life in a Chicago housing project when I read David Isay's heartbreaking Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago (1999), and something about the street drug trade in David Simons and Edward Burns' grueling The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1998). Both have become classics. Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day is, I believe, destined to join them as an on-the-spot narrative of gang culture of Chicago. Some of the people whose lives he tracks--J.T., Clarisse, Mama and Pops Patton, Reggie, Millie, T-Bone--grow on you until you feel as if you actually know them.
While a graduate student at the University of Chicago, weary of cold statistical analysis, Venkatesh began hanging out with the Black Kings, a crack-selling gang who headquartered in the Robert Taylor Homes projects. He wanted to get in touch with the gang subculture through direct observation. He entered into the project pretty naive and just a bit too full of himself. Seven years later, after following the Black Kings and establishing a relationship with their leader, one J.T., the things he'd seen and heard made him a lot more streetwise and a little less cocky.
During his seven-year study, "Mr. Professor," as J.T.'s mother initially called Venkatesh, learned that Chicago gangs, or at least J.T.'s outfit, lived in a culture of violence and machismo, but also functioned in an unexpected way as police in their own territory. From the perspective of society, they were lawbreakers.
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