Venkatesh got quasi-famous when he was featured in the book Freakonomics. I’m a third of the way through it, and I’m not really liking it. Venkatesh is too "golly gee whiz, I’m hanging out with GANGSTAS!" I imagine the second third of the book will be him realizing shit is real, yo, and the last third will be about what lessons he’s learned. It will end with his heartfelt plea for politicians and the white majority to help people get out of the projects. Maybe I’m wrong. It would be nice to be wrong. But I think I’m right.

I applaud Venkatesh’s goals — to change how (white) academia sees the poor — but the book is a little too… I dunno. Naive, maybe. Venkatesh never mentions being afraid in dangerous situations, and it makes him seem less human. The most realistic he’s seemed in all 133 pages I’ve read so far is when he’s shocked by a beating he witnessed. But he never writes about being afraid. I appreciate the fact that he was playing curious scientist, but I’m sorry, when you see someone flash a gun for the first time, it’s scary. I’m not asking that he wet his pants or anything, but he had to have been more than just a little nervous.

I think I’m going to leave this one unfinished. I’m too annoyed to keep reading it. ( )

Great intersting book. Been meaning to read it for a while, pretty eye opening. calls in to question a lot of tough things that i'm not really sure ahve been figured out yet, or even if there are people working to solve them. Also so undertones of how to run an organization (albeit the exmaple here is an illicit drug ring, but good lessons none the less). Kinda makes me want to branch out and do stuff in the inner city, but this definitely captures the difficuly of an outsider doing that, unless they plan on making it thier whole life (an admittedly big commitment). I'd recomend it. Now i gotta talk to Phil at some point and figure out why he recomended it to me, im sure he had some point.

In conclusion:
Good. Good. Good.

In my work files there's an earnest Venkatesh monograph dealing with the University of Chicago's 1920s map of the city's neighborhoods, the source of such census constructs as West Town and Greater Grand Crossing. But the Columbia University sociologist is better known for his research on the underground economy, popularized in "Freakonomics." This memoir returns to the source of both interests, his 1990s grad-school years at the U. of C. Much of his time outside of class was spent hanging out in the Lake Park and Robert Taylor Homes housing projects. There he stumbled upon a career in ethnographic research and made unlikely friends with gang leaders, squatters, hos and resident activists who had no reason to trust him other than the naivete or guile that kept him there. Their unlikely faith in him is reflected in his most notable academic finding, the low pay of foot solders in the drug trade, which literally fell into his lap in the form of gang ledgers. Ventakesh is repaying debts with this book, fleshing out the humanity of his research subjects and giving his gangland protector J.T. a biography the author told himself he would never write.

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets by Sudhir Venkatesh (2008)

Adult nonfiction; sociology/gang culture. I liked "freakonomics" better but this was a very readable and interesting book (another friend commented that she couldn't stop reading it and finished it in 2 days/nights). ( )