Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

First introduced in Freakonomics , here is the full story of Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociology grad student who infiltrated one of Chicago's most notorious gangs The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics . Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh... (more)

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World

Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World

by Robert Neuwirth

In the middle of the night they quickly build houses and seize land before the police destroy their fragile homes. They're squatters--families that risk the wrath of governments and property owners by building dwellings on land they don't own--and they represent one out of every ten people on the planet. Investigative journalist Robert Neuwirth lived among squatter communities from Rio to Bombay to Nairobi to... (more)

Dead Cities: And Other Tales

by Mike Davis

A riveting exploration of the tensions between nature and the built environment. The storm is here, crushed dams no longer hold, the savage seas come inland with a hop. —Jacob van Hoddis As Mike Davis shows, prophecies of urban doom too often come true. Beginning with a trip to New York's Ground Zero, Davis pairs the horror of lower Manhattan's falling skyscrapers with Las Vegas' delirious delight in... (more)

Sexed Work 'Gender, Race and Resistance in a Brooklyn Drug Market' (CSC) (Clarendon Studies in Criminology)

Sexed Work 'Gender, Race and Resistance in a Brooklyn Drug Market' (CSC) (Clarendon Studies in Criminology)

by Lisa Maher

Based on three years of ethnographic work in New York City, this book provides the first detailed account of the economic lives of women drug users. Set in a neighborhood plagued with AIDS, Sexed Work reveals the economic lives of a group of women whose options have been severely circumscribed, not only by drug use, but also by poverty, racism, violence, and enduring marginality. Maher draws extensively on the... (more)

Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World

Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World

by Panel on Urban Population Dynamics, National Research Council

Virtually all of the growth in the world’s population for the foreseeable future will take place in the cities and towns of the developing world. Over the next twenty years, most developing countries will for the first time become more urban than rural. The benefits from urbanization cannot be overlooked, but the speed and sheer scale of this transformation present many challenges. A new cast of policy makers is... (more)

Mothering Inner-City Children: The Early School Years

Mothering Inner-City Children: The Early School Years

by Katherine Brown Rosier

Based on three years of interviews and observations with Indianapolis mothers, analyzing the families in their homes, schools and other social settings, this book brings forth the voices of mothers in creating a portrait of low-income African American families rearing children.

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: urban sociology