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 entrée 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, he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of the next decade inside the projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there. Over the next seven years, Venkatesh 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. Gang Leader for a Day is an inside view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in an urban war zone. It is also the story of a complicated friendship between two young and ambitious men, a universe apart.

素德•文卡特斯（Sudhir Venkatesh, 1966— ）美国社会学家，出生于印度，哥伦比亚大学教授，主要研究城市犯罪组织、毒品交易，以及卖淫等地下经济现象。曾经因痴迷感恩而死（the Grateful Dead）乐队而追随其全美巡演，顺便研究青年自我认同问题， 后因博士论文“副产品”《城中城：社会学家的街头发现》知名，成了研究地下经济交易活动的专家。文卡特斯还有《暗箱操作：城市贫民的地下经济》（Off the Book: the Underground Economy of the Urban Poor）《漂浮之城：流氓社会学家的纽约地下经济观察记》（Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy）等著作。

译者简介

孙飞宇，北京大学社会学系副教授，主要研究方向为社会学理论。