Author(s): Philippe Bourgois (San Francisco State University)

True Crime

Philippe Bourgois's ethnographic study of social marginalization in inner-city America, won critical acclaim when it was first published in 1995. For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods - East Harlem. This new edition adds a prologue describing the major dynamics that have altered life on the streets of East Harlem in the seven years since the first edition. In a new epilogue Bourgois brings up to date the stories of the people -Primo, Caesat, Luis, Tony, Candy - who readers come to know in this remarkable window onto the world of the inner city drug trade.