Author of the week: Sudhir Venkatesh

last updated 8 January 2015

America’s “rogue sociologist” appears to be suffering a professional crisis, said Craig Taylor in The Guardian (U.K.). Sudhir Venkatesh, who gained prominence eight years ago when the best-seller Freakonomics highlighted the findings he’d made by embedding with a Chicago drug gang, spends much of his new book confessing ambivalence about forever playing a fly on the wall. In Floating City, his study of New York City’s underground economy, the Columbia University professor watches a crack dealer try to scare up customers in a tonier market, struggles to understand an heiress who runs a prostitution ring, and witnesses a beating in a strip club. “I felt so useless,” he writes. “All I ever did was sit there and take notes.” Oddly, his serial failure to turn observations into “formal” findings strengthens the book’s appeal.

A reader can’t help noticing that everybody in Venkatesh’s New York seems to be going rogue, said Will Boisvert in Publishers Weekly. The heiress, “Analise,” gravitates to the illicit economy, for instance, because it allows her to establish herself as more than just a rich man’s daughter getting ahead on family connections. “There’s an aspirational quality to New York—wanting to make it on your own,” Venkatesh says. “The book is all about people trying to get out of the boxes that sociologists like me put them in.” Some of his subjects, he admits, even flipped the script on him when he was experiencing his greatest bouts of self-doubt. “They understood me,” he says, “better than I understood myself.”