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Gang Leader for a Day
- A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
- Narrated by: Reg Rogers, Sudhir Venkatesh, Stephen J. Dubner
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
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Publisher's summary
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 hoping to impress his professors with his boldness, he never imagined that as a result of the assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade inside the projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there.
Over the next seven years, Venkatesh got to know the neighborhood dealers, crackheads, squatters, prostitutes, pimps, activists, cops, organizers, and officials. From his privileged position of unprecedented access, he 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.
In Hollywood speak, Gang Leader for a Day is The Wire meets the University of Chicago. It's a brazen and fundamentally honest view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in what is tantamount to an urban war zone. It is also the story of a complicated friendship between Sudhir and JT: two young and ambitious men a universe apart.
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Born Bright, C. Nicole Mason's powerful memoir, is a story of reconciliation, constrained choices, and life on the other side of the tracks. Born in the 1970s in Los Angeles, California, Mason was raised by a beautiful but volatile 16-year-old single mother. Early on, she learned to navigate between an unpredictable home life and school, where she excelled. By high school, Mason was seamlessly straddling two worlds.
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Solid Book
- By Daryl on 11-06-16
By: C. Nicole Mason
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Girls Like Us
- Fighting for a World Where Girls Are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself
- By: Rachel Lloyd
- Narrated by: Rachel Lloyd
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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During her teens, Rachel Lloyd ended up a victim of commercial sexual exploitation. With time, through incredible resilience, and with the help of a local church community, she finally broke free of her pimp and her past and devoted herself to helping other young girls escape "the life". In Girls Like Us, Lloyd reveals the dark world of commercial sex trafficking in cinematic detail and tells the story of her groundbreaking nonprofit organization: GEMS.
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Rachel Lloyd is an Amazing Woman
- By joan m. on 01-14-22
By: Rachel Lloyd
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The Birthday Party
- A Memoir of Survival
- By: Stanley N. Alpert
- Narrated by: Richard Powers
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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On January 21, 1998, the night before his 38th birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was kidnapped by a car full of gun-toting thugs. Hoping to make a large withdrawal with his ATM card, they took him, blindfolded, to a Brooklyn apartment, and improvised. All night, his captors alternately held guns to his head, threatened his family, engaged him in discussions of "gangsta" philosophy, sought his legal advice, and even offered him sexual favors from their prostitute girlfriends as a "birthday present."
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Since there haven't been any SERIOUS...
- By Douglas on 04-30-15
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S Street Rising
- Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C.
- By: Ruben Castaneda
- Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
- Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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During the height of the crack epidemic that decimated the streets of D.C., Ruben Castaneda covered the crime beat for the Washington Post. The first in his family to graduate from college, he had landed a job at one of the country’s premier newspapers. But his apparent success masked a devastating secret: he was a crack addict. Even as he covered the drug-fueled violence that was destroying the city, he was prowling S Street, a 24/7 open-air crack market, during his off hours, looking for his next fix.
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Some good DC history & time travel
- By Marie on 07-12-16
By: Ruben Castaneda
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Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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Faces of the Gone
- Carter Ross, Book 1
- By: Brad Parks
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Four bodies, each with a single bullet wound in the back of the head, stacked like cordwood in a weed-choked vacant lot: That's the front-page news facing Carter Ross, investigative reporter with the Newark Eagle-Examiner. Immediately dispatched to the scene, Carter learns that the four victims - an exotic dancer, a drug dealer, a hustler, and a mama's boy - came from different parts of the city and didn't seem to know one another.
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Wish Brad Parks were more prolific!!!!
- By shelley on 02-16-18
By: Brad Parks
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My Korean Deli
- Risking It All for a Convenience Store
- By: Ben Ryder Howe
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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This sweet and funny tale of a preppy editor buying a Brooklyn deli with his Korean in-laws is about family, culture clash, and the quest for authentic experiences. It starts with a gift. When Ben Ryder Howe’s wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents’ self-sacrifice by buying them a store, Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along.
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Absolutely delightful!
- By Grace O'Malley on 03-19-11
By: Ben Ryder Howe
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A Dangerous Road
- Smokey Dalton, Book 1
- By: Kris Nelscott
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
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Private Investigator Smokey Dalton works for Memphis, Tennessee’s black community. He has almost no interaction with the white hierarchy, even though they exist only blocks away. So he’s surprised the day a white woman walks into his Beale Street office. Laura Hathaway has sought him out because he’s a beneficiary in her mother’s will, and Laura wants to know why. So does Smokey. He’s never heard of the Hathaways, but his search will take him on a journey that will change everything he’s ever known.
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Interesting Slice of US History...but Ponderous
- By Rancher on 12-18-13
By: Kris Nelscott
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The Murder of Sonny Liston
- Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights
- By: Shaun Assael
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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On January 5, 1971, Sonny Liston was found dead in his home - of an apparent heroin overdose. But no one close to Liston believed that his death was accidental. Digging deep into a life that Liston tried hard to hide, Shaun Assael treats the boxer's death as a cold case. The result is a riveting whodunit that evokes a glorious and grimy era of Las Vegas.
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Great read
- By Diane Dodge on 09-14-19
By: Shaun Assael
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High-Risers
- Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing
- By: Ben Austen
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to 23 towers and a population of 20,000 - all of it packed onto just 70 acres a few blocks from Chicago's ritzy Gold Coast. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of government. For the many who lived there, it was also a much-needed resource - it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the families dispersed.
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Little mention of accountability of the people getting the housing
- By Steve D Renz on 05-15-18
By: Ben Austen
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The Beast Side
- Living (and Dying) While Black in America
- By: D. Watkins
- Narrated by: Brandon Rubin
- Length: 4 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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To many in the age of Obama, America had succeeded in "going beyond race", putting the divisions of the past behind us. And then 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and then Baltimore blew up; and then gunfire shattered a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly the entire country awakened to a stark fact: Young Black men are an endangered species.
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Excellent
- By Bruce Cline on 03-28-23
By: D. Watkins
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Don't Shoot
- One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America
- By: David M. Kennedy
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 13 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Gang- and drug-related inner-city violence, with its attendant epidemic of incarceration, is the defining crime problem in our country. In some neighborhoods in America, one out of every 200 young black men is shot to death every year, and few initiatives of government and law enforcement have made much difference. But when David Kennedy, a self-taught and then-unknown criminologist, engineered the "Boston Miracle" in the mid-1990s, he pointed the way toward what few had imagined: a solution.
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Tragically Under-Appreciated
- By Nathan Witkin on 12-02-22
By: David M. Kennedy
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What listeners say about Gang Leader for a Day
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JPB
- 09-11-16
Rare and unique
Well worth listening to. This story is entertaining, heartbreaking, funny and educational. Anyone interested in the diversity of our social structure will be well rewarded by listening.
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- Ignatius
- 12-01-20
Impressive
What a terrific story. Like Clockers by Richard Price or The Wire on HBO, but it's true. The author, who has giant cojones, is a sociologist who goes native in one of the toughest public housing projects in America. Highly recommended.
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- Kevinaom
- 10-24-20
An Incredible Story
Really an incredible story of deep learning. All your assumptions about gangs and gang leaders will be questioned and challenged.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-14-16
entertaining and educational! loved it.
if you want to understand the relationship of the inner city residents , gangs, polices, and politics, in a vivid and first hand experience , you've got to read this book.
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- Debali
- 02-09-08
Brilliant Urban Ethnography
This is a fantastic book. I think the complaints about the narrator are unfounded. The chief narrator delivers the work in a fairly straightforward standard American accent that is very close to the author's own voice. (Venkatesh reads the last hour or so of the book). As for the work itself, it is the work of a wonderfully thoughtful young sociologist. I have read his first book and this is a great companion to that no less powerful, though far more academic, work. In short, this is one of the best audiobooks I've "read" in a long time. As a fellow Ph.D. graduate from the University of Chicago, I particularly appreciated his comments on Hyde Park and the overall relationship between blacks and students in the neighborhood. Highly recommended.
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- dez
- 08-06-16
Love it!
I've listened to it 3 times. This is definitely one of my all time favorite stories.
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- Anonymous User
- 03-22-23
Great listen
It was a great listen. The speaker is so authentic it feels as if your there with them
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- Mark
- 12-18-15
Fascinating from beginning to end
The best book I’ve read all year. A young sociologist grad student spends 10 years hanging out with people in the poorest housing project in Chicago, befriending the residents and the gang that controls it. He gets so tight with the gang, the top guy allows Sudhir to be gang leader for a day and one of the gang’s top officers hands over all its ledgers, including how much it pays wholesale for cocaine, how much it retails it for, how much it costs to bribe the cops, etc. Fascinating from beginning to end. My favorite part were the discussions of how the female residents navigate poverty and interactions with the male-only gangs. Grade: A+
Perfect narration.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Brenda
- 03-19-08
Enlightening and Profound!
I was amazed at the level of detail this person was able to gain from being so entrenched into the lives of so many people within the gang and projects. This books has many shocking stories and events is by far one of the most interesting books I've listened to so far. This is a must "listen" book!
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2 people found this helpful
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- Brad
- 03-10-19
good book, bad narrator
really good book. really bad narrator. The story was amazing but I almost didn't get through it because of the terrible narration.
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