Gang Leader for a Day
A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
A young sociologist embeds with a Chicago crack-dealing gang and upends what he thought he knew about the urban poor.
As a young graduate student, Sudhir Venkatesh walked into a Chicago housing project with a survey and ended up spending years alongside the leader of a crack-dealing gang. The result is a gripping, morally complicated field study that reads like a memoir, revealing the hidden economy and social order of a community usually reduced to statistics. It made Venkatesh famous and later informed Freakonomics. Mark Zuckerberg selected it for his A Year of Books reading list.
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