Sophia C. reviewed on 3/25/2009 + 289 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 4

Sudhir Venkatesh, of Freakonomics fame, gives a riveting account of life that most of us don't experience in Gang Leader for a Day. I felt I was there with him as he began his ethnographic research in Chicago's Robert Taylor projects as a young naive sociology graduate student in the late 1980s. He befriends the local gang leader JT whose authority helps opens up life in the projects and the drug-selling street gangs to unprecedented academic study. He maintains the momentum as he chronicles how some of the poorest Americans survive amidst poverty, corruption and violence during the peak of the crack cocaine epidemic. Rather than dry scholarly prose, Venkatesh delivers this "promised biography" of JT and the Robert Taylor tenants in a rich, humanizing voice. I would recommend this book to anyone concerned with race, poverty, urban development, and public policy in the United States.

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