'Gang Leader for a Day' by Sudhir Venkatesh - Book Review

As a young sociology graduate student at the University of Chicago, Sudhir Venkatesh spent much of about seven years hanging out in and learning about a Chicago housing project and the Black Kings gang that dominated it. Gang Leader for a Day is one of the author's books recording these experiences. It is a gripping account of a slice of life most readers will never experience and contains significant insights into the workings of gangs and impoverished urban communities.

Sudhir Venkatesh first visits the projects as a naive grad student with a simplistic multiple choice survey on poverty. He becomes a friend and biographer of JT, the head of the local chapter of the Black Kings gang. Through this relationship and years spent in the projects he comes to a better understanding of the activities of a corporate gang and its relations with the community. The Black Kings is a criminal enterprise, but it also acts as a police force and social organization. There's a complex web of connections with the community both profiting from and being destroyed by the gang. Venkatesh explores other powerful elements of the projects from tenant leaders to clergy to the city housing authority. Among the leadership class there's a steady stream of graft and favoritism mixed with delusional belief about helping the community.

Gang Leader for a Day is fascinating, but it has holes. There's little discussion of legitimate economic activity or residents who are opposed to the crime endemic to the projects. Further, there is no attempt to propose solutions to the problems he observes, but only to gawk at them. Additionally, the book contradicts Venkatesh's other accounts of his experiences such as Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. The very name Gang Leader for a Day is a misleading account of the author's actual involvement. Venkatesh's book is about hustling. Gang Leader for a Day makes this reader wonder if he's being hustled.