My favourite anecdote in the book on p.14 The author gets access to a gang and whips out his questionnaire. “How does it feel to be black and poor? Very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good or very good?” The triumph of quantitative sociology! The answer didn’t quite fit the options – “Fck you! You got to be fcking kidding me!” (Fortunately, he takes a more ethnographic turn later).

I’m finding this fascinating reading. If you’re a fellow sociologist and want to see what he produced academically based on it, look for American Project

This fascinating book takes us into a world that most of us will never be privileged – or rather under-privileged enough to see – the housing projects of Chicago’s South Side, where gangs effectively rule, and drugs and violence are endemic. As a new grad student in sociology, Sudhir Venkatesh naively entered the projects to conduct a survey, and found himself held captive by a gang overnight. Fortuitously, though, he met J.T., the gang leader, who had a college education and recognised Sudhir as a source of external validation about his own life, which most others would condemn. J.T. opened up the community to Sudhir – and lets us peek as well into the appalling lives of the project’s residents. We get to see why poverty remains the entrenched way of life – you can’t help but feel that the odds are completely stacked against these people as they struggle to survive from day to day. Recommended as an eye-opener.