This book is an easy enough read, but seems a bit closer to gossip-reporting than to analysis. Given how long the ethnographies took, one would expect the narrative to be a bit deeper, but perhaps I just need to look at other articles by the graduate students who co-authored the various chapters. Instead, each chapter has snippets of interviews and quotes, the honesty of which might have been made possible only by how long the authors spent in the neighborhood, but which really just don't add up to much more than some narratives of race and class that are fairly familiar to most people who've spent much time in Chicago.

This book pretty much repeated what we already know: that Chicago is segregated due to deep seated racial tensions between different groups of people. I just wish this book offered practical advice on how to reduce segregation.

A really good, quick read for those interested in how (and why) neighborhoods in Chicago have changed over the past 30 years and what can be done about it.

What a mess. I read this in 2010 and thought it merely lame. Now, after several more close rereadings, I think it's worthless, forgettable, not worth my concentrated readings.

This book's problems are numerous, one of which may be due to the fact that authorship is credited to two professors (Wilson & Taub) and nine graduate students. Too many chefs in the kitchen creates problems of interpretative continuity; the valence given to facts or testimony in one section don't hold throughout.

Possibly, the problem may be the genre itself; perhaps all urban ethnographies come off as badly outdated soon after their publication, especially those (like this one) that apply pseudonymous names to real neighborhoods, depriving the text of the historical relevance to which it might aspire.

I'm a big fan of Christopher Lasch, so I liked seeing his ideas cited. But I can easily imagine Lasch blasting this book if only given the chance.

I can imagine how a book like this could help the careers of post-docs, but the end result amounts to little more than is available in the daily newspapers.

The tragic shooting deaths of two 13-year-old-girls, referred to in Chapter Two, was widely covered by the local press, who in some ways provided a much deeper analysis of the neighborhood called Clearing than is proffered by this book.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/19...

The language in this book is often unbearably stilted, presumably the result of their striving to achieve as objective a report as possible, as if the reporters were flies-on-the-wall, not real persons possibly influencing the testimony being acquired.

My candidate for the dumbest line in the book goes to:

This study shows that in a city experiencing ongoing ethnic migration, the metamorphosis of neighborhoods continues and expressions of ethnic antagonisms vary in subtle ways" (164).

I'm not sure what this book was trying to say. It's possible that whatever one of the nine credited authors might have liked to have emphasized was rounded-off or sanded-down in the pre-production phase to suit the other eight authors, producing in the end only mush.

At points I wished I could check the informant's unabridged testimony against the published version.

I wonder if the authors' claim that "The rapid exodus of whites from Dover will very likely continue until they become a negligible percentage of the population" has proven true.

I don't doubt the authors' good intentions, but books like this contribute to urban sociology's increasing irrelevance—a topic Orlando Patterson recently bemoaned:

http://chronicle.com/article/How-Soci...

There are many instances in this book where the narrator invites the charge of being either deaf or dumb to a counter-interpretation than the one supplied.

I accept that pseudonyms are often necessary in fieldwork, and I doubt that testimonies were fabricated or embellished. But without dates, names, or deft writing, these case studies amount to much less analytically than what one might get from newspapers. I found myself repeatedly thinking: Why should I care that a supposedly real person said X at some point in time about Y?

There are many instances in this book where the author(s) could have cited empirical data to confirm or refute various claims or assertions, which would have added enormous heft to this too often superficial analysis.

The fact that Wm. J. Wilson has taken to writing/thinking about "The Wire" calls to mind a funny line in Don DeLillo's satire of the academy ("White Noise") in which a professor states: "I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes" (10).

If the social life of inner-cities were thought of as an analysand, the psychoanalyst-authors of this text would be deigned deaf & dumb. Although this book is loaded with lots of comments, bar-talk, grocery-store talk, man-on-the-street asides, community meeting discourse, and other tales told (not by idiots) full of sound and fury, without illuminative analysis it all sums to pretty much nothing, a waste of time, like having spent time with Oprah or Dr. Phil.

There Goes Urban Sociology: Jargoning, Featherbedding, and Theorizing Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Its Meaning for Contemporary Ethnography.

May 2010
June 2015