Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Sidewalk is an ethnographic study of the lives of magazine and book vendors on Sixth Avenue in New York, written by Mitchell Duneier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), who spent most of the 199s on a street corner talking with his subjects and selling them print publications. The result is an unassuming and thorough exploration of issues of race, class, public space, community, social roles and personal choice, interspersed with details of the lives of several Sixth Avenue vendors. One of them is Hakim Hassan, an educated black man who decided to leave the corporate world to sell books on the sidewalk after being fired from a job at a law firm. Hassan became Duneier