From Publishers Weekly
Anthropologist Bourgois chose "addicts, thieves, and [drug] dealers to be [his] best friends and acquaintances" during his three-and-one-half-year research residency in New York City's Spanish Harlem. This experience-packed account of social interactions and relations is the result of great amounts of time spent on the street, in crackhouses, and in the homes of East Harlem's residents, who are caught up in a constant struggle against personal powerlessness. A "wealth" of available drugs fosters major substance abuse that overlays and exacerbates the failure of individuals to overcome poverty and unsupportive if not outwardly antagonistic and racist power structures. Bourgois is not sanguine about the implementation of possible solutions to the not atypical plight of El Barrio's poverty-stricken (nonestablishment) people, who are too often self- or other-destructive in their often futile search for integrity. This look at a major inner-city problem is highly recommended for academic and larger public library social science collections.?Susanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
"Some of the best ethnographic research being conducted today concerns the use of crack cocaine in different inner- and outer-cities. Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois spent several years studying the crack trade in his East Harlem community...He was able to gain entry to a world of economic, gender, age, and ethnic relationships that are closed to representatives of official society." ICCA Journal

"offers one of the most closely observed accounts we are likely to get of the urban crack scene...it provides a fascinating account of the obstacles crack sellers face as they seek to earn a living." New York Review of Books

"offers one of the most closely observed accounts we are likely to get of the urban crack scene...it provides a fascinating account of the obstacles crack sellers face as they seek to earn a living." New York Review of Books
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"Now In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, by Philippe Bourgois, brings the lives of these crack dealers into brilliant focus. Bourgois' raw and poignant book delivers a message about the economics of exclusion that should shake public perceptions of the inner-city drug trade....Bourgois offers us truly culturally privileged information...for anyone interested in the brutal truth about drug dealing in our inner cities, In Search of Respect is the place to look." Washington Post Book World

"Now In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, by Philippe Bourgois, brings the lives of these crack dealers into brilliant focus. Bourgois' raw and poignant book delivers a message about the economics of exclusion that should shake public perceptions of the inner-city drug trade....Bourgois offers us truly culturally privileged information...for anyone interested in the brutal truth about drug dealing in our inner cities, In Search of Respect is the place to look." Washington Post Book World

"...[a] masterful study of the drug trade in upper Manhattan....[a] fascinating book....Bourgois' wealth of detail adds greatly to his picture of the internal logic of ghetto life....Bourgois' portraits are so carefully executed, so unflinching, that it's impossible to walk away from this book without a profoundly different perspective on the inner city." London Review of Books
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