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Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets | 
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Author: Sudhir Venkatesh
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 4103
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 1594201501
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.10660977311
EAN: 9781594201509
ASIN: 1594201501
Publication Date: January 10, 2008
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Product Description
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 entre 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 an urban 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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| Customer Reviews: Read 41 more reviews...
 Not as gripping as it ought to be... July 21, 2008
I found the book to be very good, however I thought it could have been better.
While it contained many great stories about events Sudhir experienced, I would have preferred it if it was a biography on the gang leader, or the gang.
A bit less of the sociology side of things would have made it more enthralling. The title over-hypes things though, as - trying not to give things away here - his day as a gang leader is a very small part of the story.
All things considered though, not bad.
 fastinating reading July 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I heard about this book as a result of the author doing an interview on NPR. Since I live in a somewhat mixed neighborhood in-town in a mid-size city, I had some personal interest as to insights into gangs and lower-income life.
I found the book to be fastinating reading, and an easy read. The reader should understand that the gang the author tagged along with and the housing projects that he frequented were of a large scale in a large city, and may not be indicative of lower level gangs and street neighborhoods with less structure. Still, the leadership, management, and structure involved in running a large gang operation was something I had not anticipated. Likewise, the author describes, and was conflicted by, as was I, an unexpected and enlightening interplay of the various "good deeds" that the gang performed versus their illicit activities and power tactics. The idea that the gang filled a "services" void (protection, food and clothing contributions, youth activities, dispute mediation) for the residents of the community is something I heard of before but did not really think about.
The book left me thinking about what it really would take to bring this sector of our society out of poverty and into the mainstream. The author does not address this, or any solutions at all, and this is perhaps the books' only shortcoming.
 Solid Account of Life in the Chicago Projects June 25, 2008
Like many others, I found the chapter of Freakonomics based on Venkatesh's data on drug dealing to be the most compelling of the book. So I looked forward to picking up this extended account of his journey into the murky world of Chicago public housing and the research he did there from 1989-95. His entry into that world is a decidedly naive and somewhat accidental one, as he commences work toward his sociology PhD at the University of Chicago by assisting in a research project. This project requires him to go to several apartments in a public housing high-rise to administer a rather ridiculous questionnaire. Unfortunately, the resident drug gang suspects him of being a spy for a rival gang and holds him overnight until their boss can decide what to do with him.
Fortunately, the boss ends up taking a shine to Venkatesh and allows him to hang out around the gang and its slice of the Robert Taylor Homes housing project. This one decision (based at least partially on the gangster's belief that Venkatesh will use the material to write a biography of him), grants the student and budding scholar almost unprecedented access to the day-to-day functioning of a street gang, as well as a passport to the roam around the projects talking to the residents about their daily life. Venkatesh is very up front about his naivety, his discomfort with the role he was playing to gain the trust of people, the complexity of needing to befriend them in order to hear their stories, and the benefit his access to their stories has had on his academic career. In the end, he concludes that he is just as much a "hustler" as those he meets throughout his seven years, taking advantage of others as needed, in order to survive.
The focus of the book is on his interaction with the "Black Kings" gang, however, much of the material on their workings is interesting but not necessarily revelatory Basically, if you've seen season one of The Wire, you'll be more or less equally up to speed on the mechanics of drug slingin' street gangs. This is at least partially due to the rather edited view of operations the gang afforded him. What's more surprising in his account is the naked power over daily life in the projects wielded by the female middle-aged president of the tenants association, who comes across as just as venal and egocentric as the gang leader. Indeed, she and the gangster had an established rapport and arrangement, in which she could tap the gang for "donations" for community events, or to police the buildings, in exchange for not raising a fuss about their drug dealing. Venkatesh also spends a fair amount of time with the regular "citizens" of the projects, as well as a few community workers and one policeman. A striking absence from his fieldwork is any attempt to interact with the Chicago Housing Authority, under whose auspices the Robert Taylor Homes falls, and whose utter ineptitude and corruption pervades the entire book.
The cumulative effect is a rare look at the networks of power within a poor urban community, as well as a cautionary tale about the strengths and weaknesses of the ethnographic process. I found myself rather more drawn to his stories of the various licit and illicit hustles people run in order to make ends meet -- it turns out these are the focus of an earlier work of his called Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, which I'll probably end up reading at some point.
Note: As at least one other reviewer has noted, those interested in the "participatory observation" approach to studying gangs would be well-advised to check out Martin Sanchez-Jankowski's Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society, based on ten years of fieldwork among 37 gangs in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. Rather oddly, Venkatesh never refers to it.
Fun and informative; you can't put it down June 21, 2008
I enjoyed this very much. Sudhir can write so well that it's one of those "you can't put it down" books. I also learned a great deal of interesting knowledge that I would not have been able to find out any other way: not only what the drug trade is like, but what life is like inside a dilapidated low-cost housing tower. I've been recommending this to all my friends.
Amazing book - But I have ambiguous feelings about the author May 17, 2008
This is a very readable book - sad, funny and haunting. However I have some very ambiguous and sometimes very negative feelings towards the author Sudhir Venkatesh, especially while reading his last chapter. For most of the book, the relationship between Sudhir and JT comes across as a warm and trusting freindship. I really was rooting for both of them: for Sudhir to be successful in his academic ventures and for JT - not to end up being killed or land in jail. But the last chapter was very off-putting. I was pained when Sudhir says JT wasn't his friend and he doubts whether he ever was. He also sounds very condescending when he describes JT as being clingy. It really appears that Sudhir was really using JT for his research and all the "friendship" and camaraderie was just playacting - a means to an end. In the end Sudhir made his academic career out of the people who befriended him and after his mission was accomplished, he has discarded them like a used glove.
I am an Indian-American and I am proud of the success and acclaim that Sudhir Venkatesh has recieved first for his part in "Freakanomics" and now for "Gang Leader For a Day". However as a fellow South Indian, I would like to remind him of another South Indain virtue: Do not kick down the ladder that you climbed on to fame and fortune.
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