University of Pennsylvania Press. 296 pp. $24.95

They are more likely than most to die early and violently. Perhaps most important, young black men are among the most misunderstood people in America.

To bring awareness and understanding to their plight and to offer solutions, sociologist Elijah Anderson has brought together a roster of eminent and emerging social scientists and activists in his latest work, Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male.

The compelling collection of 16 essays, with a double-entendre title, was edited by Anderson, a professor of sociology at Yale University who was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania for 32 years. The essays take a sweeping look at problems faced by young black men in America's urban centers.

The collection, published last summer and issued in paperback this spring, is an outgrowth of a 2006 symposium, Poor, Young, Black and Male: A Case for National Action, which was organized by Anderson at Penn and featured many of the authors in Against the Wall.

The essays are by scholars such as Harvard's William Julius Wilson, Yale's Gerald D. Jaynes, and Temple University's David Kairys, and there is a foreword by Princeton's Cornel West.

Anderson has made certain to include the perspectives of emerging young thinkers as well, including his son Luke, a community organizer in Chicago; Waverly Duck, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Yale; and Imani Perry, a professor of law at Rutgers-Camden who is joining the faculty at Princeton University.

Anderson has long contended that in impoverished black communities, income is derived from three main sources: low-paying jobs, welfare, and an irregular, underground economy based on bartering, borrowing, hustling and street crime.

The failure of any one of those sources, he asserts, pushes individuals to one of the two others, and the disappearance of low-paying jobs and welfare drives people to the underground economy, which is governed by violence. This assertion is the premise of Anderson's seminal books Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999) and A Place on the Corner (1978).

In his own essay, Anderson writes that inferior schooling, employment discrimination, and stereotypes have taken a heavy toll on the social capital of young black men.

"All this set the stage for the situation we face today. The social costs of impoverishment fell particularly hard on the heads of young black men who are feared by the rest of society and left to fend for themselves by white authorities," Anderson writes. "In his alienation and use of violence, the contemporary poor young black male is a new social type peculiar to postindustrial America. This young man is in profound crisis. His social trajectory leads from the community to prison or cemetery, or at least to a life of trouble characterized by unemployment, discrimination and participation in an oppositional culture - which is how he goes about dealing with the alienation from society."

Several of the essays are devoted to economic issues. Others examine the impact of the criminal justice system, social institutions, and the role of culture, including hip-hop music, in the lives of young black men. There are also discussions of immigration, suicide, and the proliferation of guns in urban communities.

An essay by Kairys, a Temple law professor, addresses the question: "Why Are Handguns so Accessible on Urban Streets?" He notes that "large cities facing declining job opportunities, losses in population and tax revenues and rising levels of deprivation are being forced to accommodate virtually unregulated handgun markets."

A weakness of the book is that the prescribed solutions are not nearly as concrete or commensurate in number as the relentless documentation of the problems and the long list of them.

Still, for those trying to understand and deal with the problems plaguing inner cities early in the 21st century, this book should be on the reading list.