Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

This book will give you a much better understanding of the lives of tenants in Chicago Housing Authority projects. Gang Leader for a Day is the in-depth look at the experiences of the author that was dealt with anecdotally in Freakonamics. Anyone who's read Freakonomics will appreciate the full story that was touched on in Steven Levitt's book. It is also the story of a complicated friendship between Sudhir and JT: two young and ambitious men a universe apart.Ī great listen. It's a brazen and fundamentally honest view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in what is tantamount to an urban war zone. In Hollywood speak, Gang Leader for a Day is The Wire meets the University of Chicago. 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.

Over the next seven years, Venkatesh got to know the neighborhood dealers, crackheads, squatters, prostitutes, pimps, activists, cops, organizers, and officials. 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. 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. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatest managed to gain entree into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment. 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 by Sudhir Venkatesh