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A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
Penguin
January 2008
On Sale: January 8, 2008
318 pages
ISBN: 1594201501
EAN: 9781594201509
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
First introduced in Freakonomics, here is the full story of
Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociology grad student who infiltrated
one of Chicago's most notorious gangs The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago
crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's
attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang
Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir
Venkatesh managed to gain entrée into the gang, what he
learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic
establishment. When Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of
Chicago's most notorious housing projects, he was looking
for people to take a multiple-choice survey on urban
poverty. A first-year grad student hoping to impress his
professors with his boldness, he never imagined that as a
result of the assignment he would befriend a gang leader
named JT and spend the better part of a decade inside the
projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there. Over the next seven years, Venkatesh got to know the
neighborhood dealers, crackheads, squatters, prostitutes,
pimps, activists, cops, organizers, and officials. From his
privileged position of unprecedented access, he observed JT
and the rest of the gang as they operated their
crack-selling business, conducted PR within their community,
and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang's complex
organizational structure. In Hollywood-speak, Gang Leader for a Day is The Wire meets
Harvard University. It's a brazen, page turning, and
fundamentally honest view into the morally ambiguous, highly
intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in what is
tantamount to anurban war zone. It is also the story of a
complicated friendship between Sudhir and JT-two young and
ambitious men a universe apart.
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