This is the best book I've read in the past couple months. While doing post-graduate work at the University of Chicago, author Sudhir Venkatesh went into the Robert Taylor Homes (now razed), one of the poorest and most dangerous housing projects in the country. His first question was simple: What's it like being poor and black?
He meets a leader of the Black Kings gang named JT, who becomes the author's main in-road to seeing how the gang and its drug trade works. Venkatesh weaves a fantastic narrative about life inside the projects -- crooked cops, the drug trade and how people in the projects get by. The book's title comes from a day when Venkatesh makes the decisions for the gang's resources -- after all, how difficult can it be right? But throughout the book, Venkatesh unravels the complicated power games and economics behind life in the projects and in the gang that make for a complicated case study of money and power.
Plenty of the book focuses on JT -- a charismatic and savvy individual who helps to drive the narrative. Venkatesh deals with the questions academics and journalists face -- how to stay neutral in a culture that is very black and what. Are you with us or against us? He often asks himself if he's getting too deep. He learns first-hand what happens when somebody is caught trading information, and brings the reader along for the ride.
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1 comments:
This was suggested to me by the Amazon.com book thing. I thought it looked interesting. Perhaps once I finish the five million books I'm reading, I'll add this to the list :D
-A
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