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Book Review: Urban China

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy is one of the most daring books that I have read in some time. In aspiring to tell a New York City story, author Sudhir Venkatesh weaves together an analysis of aspects of that city’s underworld, its above-world (comprised of emerging elites in business and the arts), and himself. The relevant part about him is that he is a transplant from southern California who has come to New York to build upon a promising career in sociology that was established by his prior studies of the underworld and low-income African Americans in Chicago. Consequently, he appears in this work as much more than a self-reflective ethnographer taking stock of the field and the people that he is studying. Instead, and more provocatively, Venkatesh incorporates autobiography into his explication of how a research agenda unfolded for him in what has become his second city. Floating City does not take the form of a standard academic book. There is no extensive commentary about research methods and design, nor any elaborate commentary on the scholarly intent of the project underlying this material. Venkatesh can negate those projects, fall back on his stature as a well-established sociologist, and venture into a strong story-telling effort predicated upon the reader accepting that he is a skilled interviewer, field note collector, and analyst of the urban scenario. The work begins with an introduction of a handful of seemingly archetypical New York City residents, including Ivy-League graduates, a drug dealer, and the dealer’s cousin (who is a partner of sorts in that trade). The graduates stand at an opposing point on the social class spectrum from the other two, yet they all happen to be in attendance at the same private social event in Manhattan. Why and how they came to be there, and what they ultimately have to do with each other, is a central point of the book. That point is conveyed in nearly suspenseful fashion throughout its eight chapters. Across those chapters, Venkatesh elucidates the connections between the underworld (the Harlem-based drug dealer being just one example) and the above-world (the Ivy League-educated twenty-somethings being just a few examples). The connections are fostered by drug distribution and consumption, participation in escort services and prostitution, and other formally organized means of indulgence. In the book, we learn much about the complex feelings, attitudes, commitments, and values of these and other actors: prostitutes, financiers, pimps, elite club-goers, drug dealers, and the ethnographer who is