Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

In Gang Leader for a Day, sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh recounts his time working with the gangs and inhabitants of the Robert Taylor housing projects in Chicago, Illinois. The book is a look at Chicago's poorest sections during the crack epidemic. It's also a look at how underground economies work in urban settings. It's also a look at how sociology misses the humanity behind the statistics. Throughout the book Sudhir meets various gang members and slowly earns their trust to find out what really happens in gang life. By the end of the book Sudhir is introduced to a large cross-section of life in the projects and he learns that everyone involved with the projects follows the same rules of engagement that every hustler and gang leader follow. It's a worthwhile look at how a corrupt system can keep itself going hidden from even the most prying eyes.

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The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like several other recent books about comic books, David Hajdu's Ten-Cent Plague begins in the slums of New York City during the first few decades of the 20th century. This well trod territory provides a comfortable way to slip into the world of these comic creators: low wages, cramped quarters, long hours....

But this is not a book about the creation of comics. It's the story about the death of the golden age of comics in the 1950s due to charges of juvenile delinquency and bad taste.

But it's also a story about the people who created these comics. Not just Will Eisner, Bill Gaines, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Siegel & Schuster, etc. etc. We meet most of the creators of some of the more famous superheroes along the way, but Hajdu also introduces us to the unsung heroes of comics including the women (yes women!) who wrote, drew and inked hundreds of pages of comics. These are the people who are virtually forgotten because they were fired in the 1950s after the great scare destroyed the comic market.

I'm sure most of the history in this book is familiar to those readers who have already sought out academic writing about the comics. The main story follows William Gaines and his band of misfits over at EC as they invent the genre of horror comics with their Vault of Terror and Tales from the Crypt and then end up testifying before senate sub-committees investigating the corrupting influence of comics on youth.

This is recommended for anyone interested in the history of comics or the history of censorship in the 1950s. For those who have already researched the subject, David Hajdu extends the cultural history that was laid out in Men of Tomorrow and gives new stories of the well-trod mythologies of the golden era of comics.

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