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    Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy
    Unavailable
    Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy
    Unavailable
    Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy
    Audiobook8 hours

    Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The acclaimed Columbia University sociologist and author of Gang Leader for a Day returns to the streets to connect the dots of New York's divergent economic worlds and crack the code of the city's underground economy. Based on Venkatesh's interviews with prostitutes and socialites, immigrants and academics, high-end drug bosses and street-level dealers, Floating City exposes the underground as the city's true engine of social transformation and economic prosperity-revealing a wholly unprecedented vision of New York.

    A memoir of sociological investigation, Floating City draws from Venkatesh's decade of research within the affluent communities of Upper East Side socialites and Midtown businessmen, the drug gangs of Harlem and the sex workers of Brooklyn, the artists of Tribeca and the escort services of Hell's Kitchen. Venkatesh arrived in the city after his groundbreaking research in Chicago, where crime remained stubbornly local: Gangs stuck to their housing projects and criminals stayed on their corners. But in Floating City, Venkatesh discovers that New York's underground economy unites instead of divides inhabitants: a vast network of "off the books" transactions linking the high and low worlds of the city. Venkatesh shows how dealing in drugs and sex and undocumented labor bridges the conventional divides between rich and poor, unmasking a city knit together by the invisible threads of the underground economy.

    Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy chronicles Venkatesh's decade of discovery and loss in the shifting terrain of New York, where research subjects might disappear suddenly and new allies emerge by chance, where close friends might reveal themselves to be criminals of the lowest order. Propelled by Venkatesh's numerous interviews and firsthand research, Floating City at its heart is a story of one man struggling to understand a complex global city constantly in the throes of becoming.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 12, 2013
    ISBN9780698136045
    Unavailable
    Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy

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    Reviews for Floating City

    3.5/5

    44 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Floating City is een onderhoudend boek over een intrigerend onderwerp. Sudhir Venkatesh heeft gedegen onderzoek verricht en het tot een spannend verhaal verwerkt. Jammer dat de auteur net iets te vaak probeert uit te leggen hoe de sociologie in elkaar steekt en hoe hij methodologisch te werk is gegaan. Dat maakt dat wat hij te vertellen heeft minder goed uit de verf komt. De moraal van het verhaal is ook wel erg Amerikaans. En toch kan ik het boek bij iedereen die in dit onderwerp geïnteresseerd is aanbevelen. Van harte zelfs.
    • 3/5
      A good writer, but the book itself was a little weak. Mostly about prostitutes in NYC, mixed in with some stuff about coke dealers, and a little bit about the porn business and strip clubs, and a lot about his own issues and then some more about academics and the field of sociology. All interesting topics but a little too mixed up together. Actually, if he wasn't such a good writer this would have been crap, but I'd give it 3.5 stars if that was possible.
    • 5/5
      I found Floating City a fascinating read. This is one of those rare nonfiction books that educates, enlightens, and entertains. Venkatesh's writing is never dry or dull. He invites us along on his journey, and writes as if he's confiding in a friend. Through Venkatesh, we meet a wide variety of people, most of whom are involved in some aspect of the sex trade. We get to know spoiled rich kids in search of adventure, as well as the desperate and poor who are struggling to survive. Their stories are woven together in unexpected ways, sometimes challenging our stereotypes and other times reinforcing them. But this book is much more than a look at the underground economy. Venkatesh struggles with his own boundaries. His work as a sociologist requires him to maintain an emotional distance, while his humanity makes it almost impossible for him to remain an passive observer. As he studies the behavior of others, he learns some things about himself. If we're paying attention, we'll learn a few things as well.
    • 3/5
      Interesting from a sociological research sense of New York City. Not the view that you get by walking through the city or reading the news.
    • 3/5
      This book was not what I'd expected. Sudhir Venkatesh is a sociology professor at Columbia University, NYC. His area of study is the criminal underworlds of USA cities, especially concerning sex workers and drug dealers. This book describes Venkatesh's groping toward his theory of underworld networks in NYC, how they cross regional and social divides. Most of the book is taken up with stories of Sudhir's subjects and the author's prejudices (yes he is quite judgemental!) and self-doubt. The actual theory remained elusive, at least in this book. An author's note explains that this book is more of a memoir than an exposition of the theory. I guess I would have preferred to know that up front, but the book was quite readable.
    • 4/5
      What a difference a title makes, or even a subtitle. The version I read, the US edition which I received as a review copy, had the subtitle “A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy.”This irritated me throughout the book, because I kept expecting Sudhir Venkatesh to “go rogue”, and he never did. He perhaps got a bit more emotionally involved with his subjects than sociologists are supposed to, but he was always scrupulous about not affecting the outcomes, about being ethical and honest and reading people their rights before starting any interview. He was just a sociologist doing his research. It seemed to me that the “rogue” tag had been stuck on to make the book seem more enticing.Fortunately the UK edition has the less catchy but much more accurate subtitle “Hustlers, Strivers, Dealers, Call Girls and Other Lives in Illicit New York”. So we’ll leave the “rogue” issue alone.What this book does very well is to get under the skin of New York City and explore the lives of people in the underworld. It’s written more as a memoir than as a work of sociology, so there are plenty of real-life stories and no tedious footnotes. I enjoyed the connections Venkatesh makes between the drug dealers and porn-shop clerks he studies and the “above-ground” economy."These people were seekers. As much as the peppiest young entrepreneur in any Silicon Valley garage, they dreamed of changing their worlds. And in their daily lives as ordinary citizens and consumers, their illegitimate earnings helped many legitimate businesses stay afloat. In that sense, they were pillars of the community."He shows the impromptu communities that spring up within these criminal and marginal worlds, the unexpected ties that bind people to each other, even if only for a time. The floating city refers to the fluidity of many people’s lives in a global city like New York, the lack of ties to particular neighbourhoods or other traditional social structures, the formation of more temporary communities. Mortimer, an ageing john, is touchingly cared for by local prostitutes as he recovers from a stroke. Manjun’s porn store becomes a safe haven for sex workers. People come and go, and the communities spring up in unlikely places before dying or moving on. It’s an interesting phenomenon to watch.One fault in the book, though, is the way that Venkatesh makes himself the main character in the book, and then does nothing much of any interest. It’s fine to get some insight into his research techniques and his ethical dilemmas, but it goes way too far. There are too many passages where he’s worrying about where he’s going to get his next interview from, or panicking over his project’s lack of direction, and it’s just not very compelling stuff. Here’s one example among many:"Whatever hopes I might have had about documenting the collision of worlds began to blow away in that cold autumn wind. I’d have to find another way to chart the connections the global city forged among disparate social types."He’s clearly trying to make himself into a character with something important at stake, but it doesn’t really work. He also mentions a few times that his marriage is breaking apart, but tells us almost nothing about why or how or even who his wife is – we just get generalisations about being young when they got married and now having changing priorities. It feels as if the author is trying to make himself into an interesting character, but doesn’t want to reveal too much of his personal life.The overall effect of this is to make the book feel a bit flat. There’s plenty of drama in the lives of the people Venkatesh is studying, and if he’d just related their stories, it would have worked better. Instead we spend a lot of time inside the head of an anxious sociologist, and it’s not a good place to be.So this book is recommended for its insights into the New York City underworld, but marred by its choice of focus.
    • 4/5
      Sudhir Venkatesh, Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy: Venkatesh made his name with Gang Leader for a Day, about Chicago; this book is about his attempts to make sense of New York City via its sex workers, both low-end and high-end, and how they mixed. It’s part confessional and part argument about the effects of globalization on rich people (they can always start over/flee consequences, even when they were running an escort service for a while) and poor people (forced to reinvent themselves without any safety net). It shouldn’t work and there’s a definite overdisclosure element as he discusses his own discomfort with the rich people who patronize him, but it’s the same hot mess as the city he describes, and equally compelling: we all float down here.