SocProf reviewed Floating city by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Review of 'Floating city' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This book is a lot more all over the place than Gang Leader for A Day, and I guess, that is deliberate since the main theme is "floating", crossing barriers of race, class, and neighborhood (or failing to do so) in the Global City of New York (as opposed to the "solid", neighborhood-based Chicago).
Nevertheless, for my taste, it was much too much about the author himself, and his self-made dilemmas than about the research process or the product of the research (something I was a lot more interested in). In the ends, you get a few interesting stories about specific individuals (and you never really know whether they are typical or outliers) than the big pictures.
From my perspective, a few trees are interesting, but I would have liked more about the forest.
This book is a lot more all over the place than Gang Leader for A Day, and I guess, that is deliberate since the main theme is "floating", crossing barriers of race, class, and neighborhood (or failing to do so) in the Global City of New York (as opposed to the "solid", neighborhood-based Chicago).
Nevertheless, for my taste, it was much too much about the author himself, and his self-made dilemmas than about the research process or the product of the research (something I was a lot more interested in). In the ends, you get a few interesting stories about specific individuals (and you never really know whether they are typical or outliers) than the big pictures.
From my perspective, a few trees are interesting, but I would have liked more about the forest.