商品簡介
When Venkatesh first entered an abandoned housing project in Chicago, he was simply looking for people to answer a multiple-choice survey about urban poverty. A first-year graduate 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 J. T. and spend the better part of the next decade inside the projects under J. T.'s protection, documenting what he saw there.
Venkatesh got to know the neighborhood dealers, crackheads, squatters, prostitutes, pimps, activists, cops, organizers, and officials. Granted this unprecedented access, he learned how J. T. and his gang ran their crack-selling business, conducted public relations within their community, and essentially acted as the neighborhood's main political, economic, and social force.
Gang Leader for a Day offers a brazen inside 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 the author and J. T. - two young and ambitious men, side by side but a universe apart.
作者簡介
Sudhir Venkatesh is a professor of sociology at Columbia University.
