SUDHIR VENKATESH is William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He has written extensively about American poverty and is currently working on a project comparing the urban poor in France and the United States. His writings, stories, and documentaries have appeared in The American Prospect, This American Life, The Source, PBS, and National Public Radio. Venkatesh's latest book, Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy, was published in September 2013 by The Penguin Press.
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
Paperback
(Reprint)
- ISBN-13: 9780143114932
- Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
- Publication date: 12/30/2008
- Edition description: Reprint
- Pages: 320
- Sales rank: 60,421
- Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)
- Age Range: 18Years
What People are Saying About This
.
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 povertyand 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 JTtwo 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 Economya memoir of sociological investigation revealing the true face of America’s most diverse citywas published in September 2013 by The Penguin Press
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
-
- There Are No Children Here:…
- by Alex Kotlowitz
-
- Random Family: Love, Drugs,…
- by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
-
- The Better Angel of Our Nature…
- by Steven Pinker
-
- Whistling Vivaldi: How…
- by Claude M. Steele
-
- Monster: The Autobiography of…
- by Sanyika Shakur
-
- When I Was Puerto Rican: A…
- by Esmeralda Santiago
-
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins…
- by Daron AcemogluJames Robinson
-
- Far From the Tree: Parents,…
- by Andrew Solomon
-
- The Social Animal: The Hidden…
- by David Brooks
-
- Brainwashed: Challenging the…
- by Tom Burrell
-
- Black Like Me
- by John Howard GriffinRobert Bonazzi
-
- And Still We Rise: The Trials…
- by Miles Corwin
-
- SuperFreakonomics: Global…
- by Steven D. LevittStephen J. Dubner
-
- Letters to a Young Brother:…
- by Hill Harper
-
- Eating Animals
- by Jonathan Safran Foer
-
- Narrative of Sojourner Truth…
- by Sojourner TruthImani Perry
-
- Fist Stick Knife Gun: A…
- by Geoffrey Canada
Recently Viewed
"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 sensitive, sympathetic, unpatronizing portrayal of lives that are ususally ignored or lumped into ill-defined stereotype." Finanical Times
The New York Times
As a young graduate student fresh off an extended stint following the Grateful Dead, Venkatesh began studying urban poverty. With a combination of an ethnographer's curiosity about another culture and some massive naïveté, he gathered firsthand knowledge of the intricacies of Chicago's Robert Taylor projects. Early on, he met a megalomaniac gang leader known here as J.T., who became his mentor. Venkatesh observed and learned how the crack game works, and how many have their fingers in the pie and need life to remain the way it is. He observed violence, corruption, near homelessness, good cops, bad cops, and a lot of neglect and politics-as-usual. He made errors in judgment-it took a long time for his street smarts to catch up to his book smarts-but he tells the story in such a way as to allow readers to figure out his missteps as he did. Finally, as the projects began to come down, Venkatesh was able to demonstrate how something that seems positive is not actually good for everyone. The first line in his preface, "I woke up at about 7:30 a.m. in a crack den," reflects the prurient side of his studies, the first chapter title, "How does it feel to be black and poor?" reflects the theoretical side, and both work together in this well-rounded portrayal.-Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD
In any case, Gang Leader for a Day offers a personal, memoiristic account of the author's experience with the Black Kings. The result is a book that alternates compelling drama with the tedium that no doubt characterizes a lot of gang life. Venkatesh witnesses "mouth shots" -- punches to the face inflicted as punishment on gang members who violate the rules of street-corner crack selling. He meets the sadistic "Officer Jerry," a local cop on the take, as well as the more upright "Officer Reggie," who steers clear of, but rationalizes, police corruption. He learns the gang's structure and fiscal policies, which resemble cargo-cult shadows of corporate governance. Meanwhile, other residents of the community -- like Ms. Bailey, the powerful tenant leader who has her own hydra-headed scams going -- befriend Ventakesh and open up about their economic and social struggles.
Inevitably, the author becomes involved in the action he is there to observe. The book's title derives from Venkatesh's short-lived effort to run the Black Kings for a day -- an incident that unfortunately peters out, narratively speaking. Venkatesh is asked to make decisions (some countermanded) about a clean-up detail and a minor dispute between gang members. The provocative notion of "Gang Leader for a Day" quickly dwindles into insignificance, with the episode ultimately demonstrating the banality and quotidian quality of the drug trade (let's admit it: not so different in that respect from office life). Far more dramatic is the author's involvement in helping to save the life of a gang member grievously wounded in a drive-by shooting carried out by rival gangs.
The book's true center of gravity is found in the author's long relationship with "J.T.", the leader of the Black Kings gang. Proceeding from Venkatesh's dissatisfaction with graduate-school statistics-based sociology, the allure that marginal groups seem to hold for him (he followed the Grateful Dead around for a while after college graduation), and the fact that, as he says, "I didn't have many friends", his connection to the Black Kings started out shaky and then grew stronger and stronger, before its inevitable attenuation. In fact, it often sounds a little like a love affair.
J.T. first comes upon Venkatesh when he has been detained and threatened by some gang underlings, whom he had approached with a few standard and unintentionally hilarious questions from a clipboard sheet. "How does it feel to be black and poor?" he had asked. "Very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good." When J.T. happens upon this hapless interloper, Venkatesh says, "Everything he did, every move he made, was deliberate and forceful." The next night, the author tells us, "I tried to sleep but the rest was fitful." Shortly after that, we read, "I felt a strange kind of intimacy with J.T., unlike the bond I'd felt even with good friends.... I was overjoyed that he was curious about my work." And: "It was pretty thrilling to have a gang boss calling me up to go hang out with him." And: "I turned giddy at the prospect of continuing our conversations." Venkatesh goes home to met the family and immediately "forged a bond" with J.T.'s mother. As intense as the feelings are, they come to a familiar-sounding conclusion -- by the end of the book, when the author visits J.T. during his fellowship at Harvard, he finds him "clingy."
The roots of this romance seem clear: to be accepted by J.T. and his henchmen was clearly a major accomplishment for a high school social pariah ("replete with pocket protector, bad haircut, and an armful of math and science books") who also had no friends in graduate school. One wonders if this evidently long-standing sense of being an outsider led the author into sociology in the first place -- and into the conflicts of conscience that make Gang Leader for a Day so often fascinating. The author allows J.T. to think that his work will be a "biography" and then often agonizes about this deception. It comes home to him more and more forcefully that he may be legally at risk because of what he sees and knows. Why this risk doesn't occur to him from the moment he witnesses his first drug sale I don't quite understand, but I guess he was young, and I know love is blind. Venkatesh also intermittently wrestles with the general intellectual and journalistic questions raised by close involvement with and potential betrayal of one's subject. He doesn't resolve these age-old questions satisfactorily because they cannot be satisfactorily resolved -- as Janet Malcolm so brilliantly and conclusively explains in her introduction to The Journalist and the Murderer.
The central epiphany in this book, when the scales begin to fall from the author's eyes about some of his own motives, has much to do with these questions, and it comes, appropriately enough, courtesy of the ambiguous Robert Taylor powerhouse Ms. Bailey. And it proves all by itself one of the implicit theses of Venkatesh's writing about this subject -- that the hard knocks suffered and short straws drawn by the people he is observing give them a kind of weary but deep wisdom that many of us don't have or try to ignore. "Why do you want to hang out?" Ms. Bailey asks.
"I suppose I'm learning. That's what I do, study the poor."And I suppose one could say that Venkatesh has indeed hustled three books and a scholarly reputation out of this brave and foolhardy decade's worth of associating with known criminals. But somehow he has managed to infuse this account of that time with a sweetness and naiveté that implicitly inform even the present-day point of view of this book -- nowhere more clearly than when he tells of the Black Kings laughing at him, as they do often. They laugh especially hard when he is gang leader for a day and tries to use the word "nigger" with the nonchalance of a genuine Black King. --Daniel Menaker"Okay, well, you want to act like a saint, then you go ahead," Ms. Bailey said, laughing. "Of course you're learning! But you are also hustling. And we're all hustlers. So when we see another of us we gravitate toward him. Because we need other hustlers to survive.... You need to get your information. You're a hustler, I can see it. You'll do anything to get what you want. Just don't be ashamed of it."
Author of the novel The Treatment and two books of short stories, Daniel Menaker is former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House and fiction editor of The New Yorker. His reviews, humor pieces, and other writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Slate.