Synopses & Reviews
New York is a city of highs and lows, where wealthy elites share the streets with desperate immigrants and destitute locals. Bridging this economic divide is New Yorks underground economy, the invisible network of illicit transactions between rich and poor that secretly weaves together the whole city.
Sudhir Venkatesh, acclaimed sociologist at Columbia University and author of Gang Leader for a Day, returns to the streets to connect the dots of New Yorks divergent economic worlds and crack the code of the citys underground economy. Based on Venkateshs interviews with prostitutes and socialites, immigrants and academics, high end drug bosses and street-level dealers, Floating City exposes the underground as the citys true engine of social transformation and economic prosperityrevealing a wholly unprecedented vision of New York.
A memoir of sociological investigation, Floating City draws from Venkateshs decade of research within the affluent communities of Upper East Side socialites and Midtown businessmen, the drug gangs of Harlem and the sex workers of Brooklyn, the artists of Tribeca and the escort services of Hells Kitchen. Venkatesh arrived in the city after his groundbreaking research in Chicago, where crime remained stubbornly local: gangs stuck to their housing projects and criminals stayed on their corners. But in Floating City, Venkatesh discovers that New Yorks underground economy unites instead of divides inhabitants: a vast network of off the books” transactions linking the high and low worlds of the city. Venkatesh shows how dealing in drugs and sex and undocumented labor bridges the conventional divides between rich and poor, unmasking a city knit together by the invisible threads of the underground economy.
Venkatesh closely follows a dozen New Yorkers locked in the underground economy. His greatest guide is Shine, an African American drug boss based in Harlem who hopes to break into the elusive, upscale cocaine market. Without connections among wealthy whites, Shine undertakes an audacious campaign of self-reinvention, leaving behind the certainties of race and class with all the drive of the greatest entrepreneurs. As Shine explains to Venkatesh, This is New York! Were like hummingbirds, man. We go flower to flower. . . . Here, you need to float.”
Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New Yorks Underground Economy chronicles Venkateshs decade of discovery and loss in the shifting terrain of New York, where research subjects might disappear suddenly and new allies emerge by chance, where close friends might reveal themselves to be criminals of the lowest order. Propelled by Venkateshs numerous interviews and firsthand research, Floating City at its heart is a story of one man struggling to understand a complex global city constantly in the throes of becoming.
Review
“Remarkably original. No Way Out is deeply infused with knowledge of the ethnographic literature that has identified today’s still acute policy issues in poor, urban, mostly black—and often crime-ridden—communities. To read this book is to be assaulted by the realities of Bristol Hill—and other places like it—and to become aware of the fine lines binding the heroic to the tragic in the lives of its people. No Way Out does what few other books of its kind do. It makes multiple contributions to the scholarship, while telling the stories of Bristol Hill in a way that is plain for anyone to understand.”
Review
“Original, thickly described, and well-written, No Way Out powerfully represents a world that outsiders rarely view up-close. Duck is the consummate urban ethnographer; he puts you there. Nothing short of brilliant—this book is a remarkable achievement, and will become an enduring contribution to the urban literature.”
Review
“With skill, sagacity, and sensitivity, Duck delves beneath the hype that dominates perceptions of neighborhoods with street-based drug markets and sheds new light on the residents of one such area with evocative depth and complexity. Through this lucid portrait of daily life forged under the unfathomably harsh conditions of poverty in America, we come to understand the individual and collective strategies people develop to bear the unbearable by creating a sense of order and community. Yet resilience and fortitude cannot conquer the powerful societal forces that keep generation after generation confined to these oppressive territories. No Way Out is a haunting, thought-provoking read that lingers long after we turn the final page.”
Synopsis
Given the way news is reported these days, the image of the inner city many of have is that of drug-infested ghetto plagued with crack houses and roaming addicts. Waverly Duck is here to tell a different story and give us a new image of the inner city. He conducted fieldwork in a medium-size East Coast city where the drug scene is controlled by a local group of black men who sell cocaine to white suburbanites. In this community, located outside Philadelphia, the drug dealers are not outsiders, but long-term residents, integrated with their neighbors (a diverse lot, some old, some young, some long-time homeowners, many working-class families, but many others without jobs or external social support). Duck considers their survival strategies, living in a place where they feel accepted and which they understand, like no other place. They have no way out. Duck shows us the kind of social order and morality that holds sway on Lyford Street, and that enables people to survive. He introduces a cast of characters in Bristol Hill, his citys pseudonym, highlighting the viewpoints of these residents and their codes of interaction with each other. That code ensures a daily life lived in relative safety, despite risks from the embedded drug trade (and Duck also shows us the particular pathway by which young men become drug dealers). Duck himself grew up in poverty (in Detroit), and his own life story contrasts rather dramatically with that of Alice Goffman, the well-heeled young white woman whose account of drug dealers on the run from police created a sensation, and with that of Scott Jacques, the coauthor of our forthcoming book on drug-dealing in the suburbs (in an all-white milieu). What emerges in No Way Out is an important new perspective on the culture of the urban poor, comprehensive in the range of issues it considers and revelatory in the interaction orders it uncovers.
Synopsis
In 2005 Waverly Duck was called to a town he calls Bristol Hill to serve as an expert witness in the sentencing of drug dealer Jonathan Wilson. Convicted as an accessory to the murder of a federal witness and that of a fellow drug dealer, Jonathan faced the death penalty, and Duck was there to provide evidence that the environment in which Jonathan had grown up mitigated the seriousness of his alleged crimes. Duck’s exploration led him to Jonathan’s church, his elementary, middle, and high schools, the juvenile facility where he had previously been incarcerated, his family and friends, other drug dealers, and residents who knew him or knew of him. After extensive ethnographic observations, Duck found himself seriously troubled and uncertain: Are Jonathan and others like him a danger to society? Or is it the converse—is society a danger to them?
Duck’s short stay in Bristol Hill quickly transformed into a long-term study—one that forms the core of No Way Out. This landmark book challenges the common misconception of urban ghettoes as chaotic places where drug dealing, street crime, and random violence make daily life dangerous for their residents. Through close observations of daily life in these neighborhoods, Duck shows how the prevailing social order ensures that residents can go about their lives in relative safety, despite the risks that are embedded in living amid the drug trade. In a neighborhood plagued by failing schools, chronic unemployment, punitive law enforcement, and high rates of incarceration, residents are knit together by long-term ties of kinship and friendship, and they base their actions on a profound sense of community fairness and accountability. Duck presents powerful case studies of individuals whose difficulties flow not from their values, or a lack thereof, but rather from the multiple obstacles they encounter on a daily basis.
No Way Out explores how ordinary people make sense of their lives within severe constraints and how they choose among unrewarding prospects, rather than freely acting upon their own values. What emerges is an important and revelatory new perspective on the culture of the urban poor.
About the Author
Sudhir Venkatesh is the William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology and a member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. His most recent book is Gang Leader for a Day, a New York Times bestseller that received a best book of the year award from The Economist. Venkateshs writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post. He lives in New York City.