Getting Ghost: Two Young Lives and the Struggle for the Soul of an American City - Hardcover

This is an eloquent, moving narrative account of the lives of Dude, Rodney, and other young men who trade drugs, love their family and friends, dream of ordinary lives, and navigate a maze of violence, detention, jail time, and early death in turn of millennium Detroit. Luke Bergmann's is a powerful new ethnographic voice whose vivid, gritty, dialogic writing serves as a model for us all. -Susan Harding, author of The Book of Jerry Falwell

What a terrific book. Getting Ghost reminds us that the Rustbelt is still a place to find America-and the American dream. Luke Bergmann sometimes risks life and limb to bring us first-hand the lives of young people who mainstream media and academic research have ignored-except for the occasional crime story or impersonal policy brief. Getting Ghost is a journey worth taking, though you may want to grab hold along the way. It sets a new standard for documentary reportage. -Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day and Off the Books

This sensitive and brave book takes readers into the tragedy of deindustrialization and ethnic discrimination in America to reveal the lives of those trapped in the illegal drug economy. Bergmann forces us to face the contradictions of drugs, discrimination, and poverty in our heartland. -Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect

It's one thing for social scientists to parachute into bombed-out urban districts and write movingly of the ills they discover, but quite another for Bergmann to note about one of his adolescent subjects that the boy was locked up for possibly shooting someone on a corner "not far from where I lived." It's this personal engagement that gives such resonance to his account of several years spent monitoring the lives of two teenage drug dealers....

Not just illustrative and emotive, this pummeling, immersive social text is grounded in street-level reportage and seeded with wisdom.

In prose that is equally eloquent and enlightening, Luke Bergmann brings to surface the lives of two young men living in a place that is regarded by too many people as a forgotten city. Getting Ghost makes a profound intellectual statement-that one must account for the specificity of place, family and social relations, individual agency, and economy in order to understand the lifeworlds of young men who live in disadvantage while striving to take control of their lives. -Alford A. Young, Jr, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Associate Professor, Sociology and Afro-American and African Studies, University of Michigan

"We see into these people s lives; the reader feels their hopes, their fears, their joys, and their tragedies. Dr. Bergmann writes with incredible fluency whether capturing dialogue from the streets or dissecting complicated sociological theory . . . this work will have a tremendous impact." —Paul Fine, Michigan Society of Fellows
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"We see into these people's lives; the reader feels their hopes, their fears, their joys, and their tragedies. Dr. Bergmann writes with incredible fluency--whether capturing dialogue from the streets or dissecting complicated sociological theory . . . this work will have a tremendous impact." —Paul Fine, Michigan Society of Fellows

Identifies the forces of deindustrialization and ethnic discrimination that the author argues are trapping individuals within the illegal drug trade, in an account that examines the lives of two young black drug dealers in Detroit whose efforts to obtain legal jobs have been compromised by forces outside of their control. 10,000 first printing.