A dark, revealing exposé.
An insider’s view of gang culture and warfare.
First described in Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s “rogue” guide, Freakonomics (2005), Venkatesh’s brazen foray into Chicago’s organized street life is chronicled here in its entirety. It began during his first year of graduate sociology work at the University of Chicago and took seven years to complete. The author’s colleagues asserted that quantitative and statistical data would suffice to completely deconstruct the behavioral patterns of those living in the poor, black neighborhoods surrounding the university. Instead, he chose an ethnographic approach, personally immersing himself in his vigorous research. In Washington Park, a beautiful (by day) area that the university consistently discouraged its students from frequenting, Venkatesh spoke with two sage black seniors who dispensed fatalistic views on race relations. The ballsy investigator wandered through the Lake Park high-rise housing project located just a few miles from campus, hoping to interview families about being “black and poor.” He was briskly escorted from an “abandoned” building; knives and guns were quickly drawn. With J.T., a gold-toothed, tough-talking former college student and current gang member, the author developed “a strange kind of intimacy.” Venkatesh’s guts and persistence elicited J.T.’s substantial history lesson on black Chicago, its underground economy, the crack cocaine trade and the intricate echelons of gang hierarchy. J.T. soon moved in with his proud, outspoken mother at the crack-infested Robert Taylor Homes housing project, hoping to increase his drug-selling revenue. Venkatesh dutifully followed and scrutinized prostitutes, hustlers and gang violence. Still striving to learn how gang activity and allegiances dictate behavior, he infiltrated the Black Kings crack gang. That was dangerous, complicated and legally risky; he could have been jailed for contempt for failing to share his notes with the police. Venkatesh writes of his harrowing, exhilarating fieldwork with the great pride and insatiable curiosity of a seasoned news reporter.
A dark, revealing exposé.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-150-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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