Sudhir Venkatesh is professor of sociology and African American studies at Columbia University. His writings, stories, and documentaries have appeared in The American Prospect, and on PBS and National Public Radio�s This American Life.

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.

Gang Leader for a Day Foreword by Stephen J. Dubner
Preface

One: How Does It Feel to be Black and Poor?
Two: First Days on Federal Street
Three: Someone to Watch Over Me
Four: Gang Leader for a Day
Five: Ms. Bailey's Neighborhood
Six: The Hustler and the Hustled
Seven: Black and Blue
Eight: The Stay-Together Gang

Author's Note Acknowledgments Index