Synopses & Reviews
When doing research inside Detroit’s downtown juvenile detention facility, Luke Bergmann befriended Dude Freeman and Rodney Phelps—both petty drug dealers facing profoundly uncertain futures, living difficult lives in which chaos is always around the corner. Bergmann would end up living three years among the abandoned houses and desolate vacant lots of one of Detroit’s most notorious neighborhoods.
In telling their stories and those of their families, Bergmann brilliantly explores the complex contradictions of Detroit’s status as a “chocolate city,” proudly and uniquely claimed by its predominantly black residents, where African Americans firmly hold municipal power but also suffer the legacy of lost manufacturing jobs and white flight. For young men like Dude and Rodney who strive to find ways toward “legal” jobs and straight lives, “getting ghost” is a rich metaphor—for leaving a scene, for quitting the trade, and for their own mortality.
A tour de force of original analysis and powerful storytelling reminiscent of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s bestselling Random Family and Sudhir Venkatesh’s Off the Books, Getting Ghost paints an unforgettable portrait of two young men and of the troubled city they call home.
Review
This is an eloquent, moving narrative account of the lives of Dude, Rodney, and other young men who trade drugs, love their family and friends, dream of ordinary lives, and navigate a maze of violence, detention, jail time, and early death in turn of millennium Detroit. Luke Bergmann's is a powerful new ethnographic voice whose vivid, gritty, dialogic writing serves as a model for us all. '"Susan Harding, author of The Book of Jerry Falwell
Review
"We see into these people’s lives; the reader feels their hopes, their fears, their joys, and their tragedies. Dr. Bergmann writes with incredible fluency—whether capturing dialogue from the streets or dissecting complicated sociological theory . . . this work will have a tremendous impact." —Paul Fine, Michigan Society of Fellows
About the Author
Luke Bergmann is the director of programs for the Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Use Prevention, Care and Treatment for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. He is the author of
Getting Ghost (The New Press), which he wrote and researched in Detroit while a postdoctoral fellow with the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.