CODE OF THE STREET.

• Author: Harwood, John
• Position: Review

CODE OF THE STREET By Elijah Anderson W.W. Norton & Company, $29.95

SINCE MOST VOTERS ARE FEELING prosperous right now, the presidential candidates are indulging in a lot of talk about helping the disadvantaged. Bill Bradley is the most voluble of all. He wants to make helping poor children "the North Star of our society."

If he makes it to the White House, Bradley could start by making every member of his administration read Code of the Street, Elijah Anderson's wrenching and riveting road-map of life in inner-city Philadelphia. There they'll meet, in ways no campaign visit could ever reveal, the cross-pressured teenagers, embattled parents, and world-weary elderly residents who face a dangerous daily struggle to juggle the values of the larger society with the requirements of life in a community where some neighbors share those values and others reject them altogether. Through extensive interviews, some transcribed at length to let subjects speak in their own voices, Anderson peels back many layers of the onion here. He has produced an important advance on the work of Nicholas Lemann in The Promised Land and William Julius Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged in helping illuminate what remains the greatest challenge facing American society.

Anderson is a University of Pennsylvania sociologist whose earlier work has explored the sexual mores of inner-city youth. Here he considers the role of violence in everyday life, with results both inspiring and heartbreaking. Inspiring, because of the resilience and determination demonstrated by parents and children who try to hew to the standards of "decent families" while resisting the magnetic pull of a "street" culture that mocks and threatens their aspirations. Heartbreaking, because that attraction is often powerful enough to upend that balance and sink their dreams.

The story of a 15-year-old named Tyree shows how the simplest daily errand can turn into a minefield. One Saturday, his grandmother sends him to the store for bread and milk. On the way over, in a neighborhood he has just moved into, he encounters the teenage "bols" who run the neighborhood. They "roll on" the unfamiliar intruder, knocking him to the ground. Momentarily frightened but not seriously hurt, Tyree feels impelled to respond. He heads home to clean up (without the groceries, of course), then returns and punches out one of the "bols" in a process Anderson calls "campaigning for respect" Later he's obliged to participate in a...