First introduced in Freakonomics , here is the full story of Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociology grad student who infiltrated one of Chicago's most notorious gangs

The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics . Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh managed to gain entrŽe into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment.

When Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects, he was looking for people to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty. A first-year grad 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 JT and spend the better part of a decade inside the projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there.

Over the next seven years, Venkatesh got to know the neighborhood dealers, crackheads, squatters, prostitutes, pimps, activists, cops, organizers, and officials. From his privileged position of unprecedented access, he observed JT and the rest of the gang as they operated their crack-selling business, conducted PR within their community, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang's complex organizational structure.

In Hollywood-speak, Gang Leader for a Day is The Wire meets Harvard University. It's a brazen, page turning, and fundamentally honest 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 Sudhir and JT-two young and ambitious men a universe apart.

素德•文卡特斯（Sudhir Venkatesh, 1966— ）美國社會學傢，齣生於印度，哥倫比亞大學教授，主要研究城市犯罪組織、毒品交易，以及賣淫等地下經濟現象。曾經因癡迷感恩而死（the Grateful Dead）樂隊而追隨其全美巡演，順便研究青年自我認同問題， 後因博士論文“副産品”《城中城：社會學傢的街頭發現》知名，成瞭研究地下經濟交易活動的專傢。文卡特斯還有《暗箱操作：城市貧民的地下經濟》（Off the Book: the Underground Economy of the Urban Poor）《漂浮之城：流氓社會學傢的紐約地下經濟觀察記》（Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy）等著作。

譯者簡介

孫飛宇，北京大學社會學係副教授，主要研究方嚮為社會學理論。