Getting Ghost

""Postapocalyptic." Detroit-infamous for its abandoned buildings, empty lots, and blighted streets - may be the only American city to have earned such an epithet. As a teenager who frequently visited Detroit with his father, Luke Bergmann saw the devastation caused by the collapse of the automobile industry. Years later, he returned to the city as an anthropologist to study the incarceration of inner-city youth, and his research connected him with two teenaged drug dealers, Dude Freeman and Rodney Phelps." "In an effort to break through the conventional wisdom about who sells drugs and why, Bergmann chronicles the unsettling alchemy of choice, force of habit, structural inequality, and political neglect that all combine to restrict the horizons of too many young people in America's cities. As Rodney and Dude spin through the revolving door of juvenile detention, "getting ghost" becomes a rich metaphor - for leaving a scene, for quitting the trade, and, ultimately, for mortality. With stunning insight, courage, and even humor, GETTING GHOST illuminates complex inner lives that are too often diminished by empty stereotypes as it reveals the common yearnings in all of our American dreams."--BOOK JACKET.

Luke Bergmann is a research director at the Detroit Department of Health and Wellness Promotion and a faculty associate of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.