Gang Leader for a Day Scholarly Book Review
Title: Gang Leader for a Twenty-four hour period: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
Writer: Sudhir Venkatesh
Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Twelvemonth: 2008
Caused: Purchased
Rating: 
2 Sentence Summary: Equally a grad pupil, Ventaktesh befriended J.T., a gang leader from the projects in Chicago. Over several years, the two formed a tense friendship that allowed Ventaktesh unprecedented admission to the inner-workings of life in the area and the gang'southward role in the community.
I Judgement Review: Ventaktesh's methods and lack of awareness of the implications of his project were frustrating, but the book should exist read because it provides an intimate look into a world most people would adopt to ignore.
Long Review: In his beginning semester of graduate school, Sudhir Venkatesh was eager to print his professors and figure out what his research interests might exist. When asked to do some survey work in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, Venkatesh approached the chore with the sort of naive enthusiasm i might look from a new student. Within hours of starting his survey, Venkatesh found himself being held earnest past members of the Black Kings, the gang that controlled most of the expanse.
Unexpectedly, Venkatesh made friends with the local leader of the Blackness Kings, J.T. This friendship gave Venkatesh J.T.'s support to spend more time in the neighborhood, request questions and filling in details for what turned out to be an intensely detailed economic and ethnographic survey of the Chicago projects.
In Gang Leader for a 24-hour interval Venkatesh chronicles more than a decade of working with and researching the members of this community and the complicated relationship betwixt the gang and the customs as well as J.T. and Venkatesh.
I can't give thanks Jill (Fizzy Thoughts) enough for pushing me to read this volume. Subsequently I commented on her review final year, she e-mailed me with some other thoughts about how much parts of the volume reminded her of what I do as a journalist. She suggested the ethical conflicts and insider problems would exist fascinating, and she was right. When Venkatesh enters the neighborhood, he brings with him many of the simplistic beliefs nearly how life in an area controlled by a gang works. The strength of Gang Leader for a Mean solar day is the mode Venkatesh shows his process of learning what life in that location is similar and articulating those findings to a reader.
I was surprised to learn how the gang is both a impairment and a benefit to the community. While the gang does acquit drug business in the area, members are also charged with protecting residents and keeping order in the projects when the constabulary won't do annihilation. While members of the community pay "taxes" to the gang for these services, without the gang enforcement things in the projects might be even worse than they would be without the gang.
J.T. is as well a fascinating central grapheme for this story. Smart, funny, charismatic, and ambitious, J.T. is an interesting mirror for Venkatesh and the similarities between the ii definitely raises questions almost circumstance and opportunity. The men are pretty similar, but their life circumstances couldn't be more different. The book doesn't explore these themes in much depth, merely it's an intriguing background question.
I can't say that I entirely concord with Venkatesh's methods or his continued arguments that he didn't realize some of the implications of his enquiry. At one point, Venkatesh does a detailed set of interviews to see how the undercover economy — services, food, prostitution, childcare, others — of the project works. When J.T. and other local leaders enquire Venkatesh to share his findings, he gladly discusses his research. Only later does he detect out that J.T. used those findings to cleft down on everyone in the projects who was earning money and not paying dues to the gang. Venkatesh compromised his inquiry subjects in a way that can't exist fixed, and his insistence he had no thought what would happen seems to ring hollow.
Other academics have criticized the volume extensively for these methodological and ethical lapses, and those criticisms are valid. It's a fine line to walk between researching a community in order to do good them versus researching to do good yourself. Venkatesh has fabricated a lot of coin as a result of this book and his ongoing enquiry, and I'chiliad non sure the members of the Robert Taylor Homes accept seen much of that come back to them. That's a gummy ethical question the book didn't seem to answer in any groovy detail.
The book is also much less academic than one might await of something written by a professor. There aren't many citations or acknowledgments to previous researchers who did intense ethnographies, but I don't call back that's necessarily a problem. This volume is less about sociological methods than information technology is a memoir looking inside what it means to do inquiry and be welcomed into a world most people never become to see. After finishing, I was eager to read some of Venkatesh'due south more serious nonfiction on the projects in Chicago and issues for the rural poor including Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor and American Project: The Rising and Autumn of the Modern Ghetto.
Ultimately, I recall this book accomplishes what most light nonfiction/nonfiction memoirs try to practice — tell an interesting story in a way that makes a readers want to learn more than well-nigh the subject behind the story. I advise anyone even a picayune interested in these topics should read the book.
Other Reviews: | Fizzy Thoughts | At Dwelling house With Books | Devourer of Books |
If y'all have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the principal post. All I inquire is for y'all to do the same to mine — thanks!
Source: https://www.sophisticateddorkiness.com/2010/01/review-gang-leader-for-a-day/
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