NONICTION

STREETWISE: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community by Elijah Anderson (University of Chicago: $19.95; 316 pp.). It’s bad form to assess a book by standards the author never intended to satisfy, but the material in Elijah Anderson’s “Streetwise” is frequently so good it cries out for non-academic treatment. Anderson, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has written an astute case study of street life in a racially mixed, gentrifying neighborhood in a major city--Philadelphia, by all indications. Because he lived for more than a decade in the community whose life he chronicles, he’s no voyeur, and he reproduces swatches of conversation and accounts of daily experience sufficiently compelling that one wants to dispense with the (often repetitive) sociological analysis.