I'll try not to repeat what the other reviewers have already said and
just express my opinion on the book.

It is sad but all too true that the poor seldom speak for
themselves. And even though they may live a few blocks away, it
requires a prolonged ethnographic study like Venkatesh's to get
the picture of their daily lives and economic relations.

And the picture he paints is indeed fascinating. Sterile academic
words like "gang activity" or "narcotics" that Venkatesh uses contrast
with the stark reality and the daily struggle that the urban
downtrodden have to lead. This is probably the single most important
reason to read this book. The book provides a comprehensive survey to
the twisted economic and social life of the "shady world": there is a
chapter on "soccer moms", on business people on street hustlers, the
preachers and on the street gangs. However, the main feel that I got
for Marquis Park is that of a place of crushing poverty and
despair. The anecdotes and live situations are bizarre yet possess
their own underlying logic: a gang leader as a person to turn to to
mediate conflicts; a garage owner paying his mechanics with used radio
equipment instead of cash; a church leader "placing" his parishioners
into the homes of the affluent, getting a cut of their wages and then
"rotating" them to make sure they do not lose their dependence on him;
the small business owners fostering relationships with each other
through small loans to secure against tough economic circumstance; the
same business owners are afraid to operate outside the ghetto because
the operating environment is so insecure and the relationships inside
the community provide the meager support in case of hard times. It is
breathtaking how the residents of Marquis Park completely gave up on
the safety net of the modern state and, as in primitive societies,
rely on their children to provide care and support in their old age.

The author's sympathy towards his subjects shows often in the book and
make it a far more pleasurable read. However, this comes with a lot
of effort on the reader's part. Venkatesh writing style is circular
and repetitive. The book starts from the death of the gang leader and
ends with it. This would be a nice narrative device if it were not for
mind-numbing continuous retreading over the same thoughts, ideas and
facts. And it is not that Venkatesh repeats himself word-for-word but
he just goes over the same territory and re-references or re-stresses
or reiterates ad nauseam. At some point I started treating the books
as a primary source --- a witness account rather than a synthetic
scholarly work. Another major complaint is the scatterbrain treatment
of the material. With all the repetition, some of the important
economic background and the history of the formation of the ghetto is
tucked in somewhere in the middle of the book. For example, the ghetto
got so poor because most of the blue color jobs that the ghetto
residents used to be able to get were shipped overseas. This fact is
mentioned offhandedly in the introduction of one of the middle
chapters.

Another major annoyance is the lack of numbers and statistics in the
book. How difficult was it to state what the number of people in
Marquis Park was? How many of them actually migrate out of it? It
seems that there is a constant outflow of people. What is their
average income? How does it compare to the other American inner
cities? What are the economic dynamics of it? They have become poorer
in the last twenty years, but by how much? The author claims there is
no adequate policing. How many policemen are there per resident? How
does it compare to other parts of the city? The author claims there is
overcrowding. How many square feet are there per resident? and so on.
At last it would not have hurt this book to provide some sort of an
idea of what is required to better the lot of the residents of Marquis
Park.