There's a gale of fresh energy and talent blowing through every page. Venkatesh's straightforward, honest style and gullible vulnerability make bumbling, guileless, well-intentioned Sudhir the most appealing narrator since that other endearing, in-over-his-head graduate student, Carlos Castaneda. Like good-natured, naïve Carlos, apprenticed to the wily Yacqui sorcerer, Don Juan, Sudhir is also apprenticed to a larger-than-life teacher, in this case a sadly modern-day equivalent, J.T., a charming, inscrutable gang leader who is a criminal business mastermind and the most powerful force in a notorious high-rise housing project of Chicago.
The reader meets Sudhir when he's a bright, vegetarian graduate student with a ponytail. He's from Southern California and reckless enough to go into a dangerous, high-crime neighborhood forbidden to students and ask a gang of crack dealers, "How does it feel to be poor and black in America?"
The book then follows Sudhir's education, and it's the sincere, self-critical narrative of a sensitive outsider trying to understand a violent world where ambulances dare not go, where gang members register voters and where justice is vigilante style, waiting to pounce in high-rise stairwells. As he reports on the criminal economics of hustling, Sudhir finds himself becoming a hustler, too, exploiting lives for his academic research with sometimes frightening consequences.
As a reader, you enter into a morally complex world where the police are the most dangerous gang of all, seen through the eyes of a young observer who has to decide how much truth he can reveal and still get out of the Robert Taylor Homes alive.
This book is compulsively readable and highly addicting. It caused me to cancel dates, skip meals and miss busses. Be warned.--Nick DiMartino