Sidewalk

"Sidewalk will radically change the way we think about ‘the public sphere.'"—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Yo Mama's Disfunktional!

"An inspired, yet strategically conceived work that restores a sense of new possibility and passion to ethnography just as it was threatened by cliche through its recent popularity."—George Marcus, author of Ethnography through Thick and Thin

"[Sidewalk] is in the best tradition of participant observation. If I were still teaching, I would want all of my students to read this book."—William Foote Whyte, author of Street Corner Society

"An exciting and original approach to the problems of urban life, informed by years of intensive participation and by a deep understanding of social science thinking. No one has combined theory and intimate knowledge of city streets as successfully. A masterpiece of fieldwork."—Howard S. Becker, author of Outsiders

"Duneier must be one of the outstanding ethnographers of our time: he renders visible what typically remains submerged as we take in the world at street level. This is a deep, complex, moving book that yanks you out of your own lived experiences of that world and draws you to another."—Saskia Sassen, author of The Global City

"[A] magnificent book . . . Duneier is a professor of sociology, but he has a superb journalist's ear for quotes and the ability to limn character and scene. He writes, that is, as very few sociologists do: he stays on for years, immersed in his subject, as virtually no journalist will do."—Richard Eder, The New York Times

"A necessary book . . . A work of frontline reportage, an inquiry into the economic and political and moral forces that are busy reconfiguring the city, [and] an urgent plea for justice, however couched it is in the careful, procedural, understating style of fieldwork."—Luc Sante, The Village Voice Literary Supplement

"0 Sidewalk is an intellectual treat and a student turn-on. I'm using it in my urban studies course and as a key reading for introductory sociology."—Harvey Molotch, co-author, Urban Fortunes

"Insightful and compelling . . . Capture[s] the pathos, struggle, joy, honor and dignity of the men and women of 'the sidewalk.' "—Elaine Rivera, Chicago Tribune

"Sidewalk brings us close to the hustle and bustle of urban street life—the book is a knowing, thoughtful exploration that will earn it a place among the classics of the documentary tradition."—Robert Coles

"Recommended for those concerned with current issues of informal economies, homelessness and civic regulation of ‘undesirables.'"—Jon Caufield, Coordinator, Urban Studies Program, York University, Canadian Journal of Urban Research

"A nuanced study of the lives of impoverished street vendors in New York's Greenwich Village . . . . A work that adds much to our understanding of race, poverty, and our reactions to them."—Kirkus Reviews

"I suspect this exemplary ethnography will, like Street Corner Society, speak to generations of readers . . . The photos by Ovie Carter . . . and the appendix on method are worth the price of entry . . . The entire book demonstrates . . . scrupulous care, caring, and respect . . . Duneier uses theory to help him understand and explicate his observations, never for its own sake. Like all classic fieldworkers he is open to learn, to change, as a result of the ethnographic experience."—Joan Cassell, Washington University, American Anthropologist

"Set scarcely a dozen blocks from where Jane Jacobs lived when she was writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Sidewalk is Mitch Duneier's tribute and successor to that classic work. It is a generous book, wearing its sympathy for its characters with refreshing (and well-earned) ease. It is also an unflinching and disciplined piece of scholarship that not only contextualizes the lifeways of this block but also goes to great lengths to track down the claims of informants whose credibility may be suspect in the reader's eyes . . . With the kind of painstaking care that only long-term ethnography is capable of, Duneier makes a contemporary case for what historian Olwen Hutton called the 'economies of makeshift' traditionally practiced by the itinerant poor . . . Among the most instructive sections of the book is Duneier's account of how the actual everyday rules of tolerance, negotiated in the idiom of 'respect,' are worked out within the company of vendors in the wake of new restrictions between beat cop and vendor. [Duneier] is quick to point out complications introduced by race, bureaucratic superiors, face-saving imperatives, and the competing claims to space that other vendors and businesses have. Nor is he above inserting himself into the scenario as a perturbing variable, to see how the system adjusts and where some hidden levers lie. It is a remarkable achievement . . . Ovie Carter's photographs are not only wonderfully evocative of the locale but are often strikingly illustrative of incidents recounted in the text, suggesting just how routine they must be. A methodological index beautifully presents the operating tenets of [the author's] ethnographic approach and laboriously describes what can be the incredibly frustrating work of running its products . . . [The book's] bibliography and notes are scrupulously compiled and generously defer to the relevant work of others . . . Sidewalk will join other recent ethnographies of lumpen lifeways at the margins as a durable record of street life in fin-de-siecle urban America. It has earned its way into the documentary dossier of our time."—Kim Hooper, Social Service Review