Malcolm Gladwell called it “exceptional … devastating.” Cornel West said it was “the best treatment I know of the wretched underside of neo-liberal capitalist America.” The New York Times said it was “a remarkable feat of reporting.” Goffman, the daughter of esteemed sociologist Erving Goffman and a Philadelphia native who went to the Baldwin School, had already won a major award for her dissertation. It was met with massive praise upon release. She says she witnessed 24 different police raids, including one where she was handcuffed, and four instances of men from 6th Street released from police custody with bloody fingertips. She writes of police stealing from suspects. In the book, her subjects are profiled, beaten harassed and tracked by the Philadelphia Police. She changed names and calls it “6th Street,” to avoid identifying her subjects. For six years, while a student at Penn and at Princeton, Goffman immersed herself in a Philadelphia neighborhood that she writes is “a lower-income Black neighborhood not far from campus.” The book is an ethnography of the lives of the young men (and a few women) she hung out with in the neighborhood. Last year, Alice Goffman published On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, an adaptation of her dissertation at Princeton.
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