Gerald D. Suttles

In this memoir, renowned urban sociologist Gerald D. Suttles examines his own life with the same insights that produced The Social Order of the Slum, The Man-Made City, and Front Page Economics. Having understood so much about different kinds of people, Suttles knew he couldn't write about himself without writing about the worlds that made him. So he wrote what he called an ethnoautobiography or ethnography. Those who know his work will recognize some familiar themes: social control, cognitive maps, ordered segmentation, contrived communities, and so on. But in the foreground of it all is Gerry himself, a bright kid in the hills of Western North Carolina, a tough sailor on the U.S.S. Essex, a veteran looking for a way forward in civilian life, and finally a bright young sociologist on the brink of a distinguished career. In A Journey Through Social Change, Suttles shares how he thought of his entire life as a series of accidents, most of which turned out to be - as he put it - "dumb luck." But it's what you make of accidents that matters. And Gerry Suttles made the most of every one of them.

In an age when pundits constantly decry bias in the media, we have naturally become skeptical of the news. But the bluntness of such critiques masks the much more sophisticated way in which the media frame important stories. In "Front Page Economics", Gerald D. Suttles delves deep into the archives to examine coverage of two major economic crashes - in 1929 and 1987 - in order to systematically break down the way newspapers normalize crises. Poring over the articles generated by the crashes - as well as the people in them, the writers who wrote them, and the cartoons alongside them - Suttles uncovers dramatic changes between the ways the first and second crashes were reported. In the intervening half-century, an entire new economic language had arisen and the practice of business journalism had been completely altered. Both of these transformations, Suttles demonstrates, allowed journalists to describe the 1987 crash in a vocabulary that was normal and familiar to readers, rendering it routine. A subtle and probing look at how ideologies are packaged and transmitted to the casual newspaper reader, "Front Page Economics" brims with important insights applicable to our current economic crisis.

With its extraordinary uniform street grid, its magnificent lake-side park, and innovative architecture and public sculpture, Chicago is one of the most planned cities of the modern era. Yet over the past few decades Chicago has come to epitomize some of the worst evils of urban decay: widespread graft and corruption, political stalemates, troubled race relations, and economic decline. Broad-shouldered boosterism can no longer disguise the city's failure to keep pace with others, its failure to attract new "sunrise" industries and world-class events. For Chicago, as for other rust-belt cities, new ways of planning and managing the urban environment are now much more than civic beautification; they are the means to survival.Gerald D. Suttles here offers an irreverent, highly critical guide to both the realities and myths of land-use planning and development in Chicago from 1976 through 1987.

While he did the research for this book, Gerald Suttles lived for almost three years in the high-delinquency area around Hull House on Chicago's New West Side. He came to know it intimately and was welcomed by its residents, who are Italian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Negro. Suttles contends that the residents of a slum neighborhood have a set of standards for behavior that take precedence over the more widely held "moral standards" of "straight" society. These standards arise out of the specific experience of each locality, are peculiar to it, and largely determine how the neighborhood people act. One of the tasks of urban sociology, according to Suttles, is to explore why and how slum communities provide their inhabitants with these local norms. The Social Order of the Slum is the record of such an exploration, and it defines theoretical principles and concepts that will aid in subsequent research.