A tedious 382 pages
Mr. Venkatesh obviously immersed himself in the daily life of the urban poor, and certainly has an interesting five page journal article here, unfortunately he also has an addional382 pages of tedious, repetitive anecdotes from his time interviewing the urban poor. After reading a story about someone illegally repairing a car in an alley for the 100th time (probably not an exaggeration) you start to feel like you are not really getting the full scope of the story.The limited use of any facts or survey data make this book less useful than it could have been if it were not so focused on anecdotes with little contextual data.