The copy of "The Corner" I ordered had been released from a library in Virginia because of, the red stamp in the front of the book read, "low demand." Therein lies a reflection of the tragedy at the heart of the book.
David Simon and Edward Burns portray a year in the life of a drug-ravaged West Baltimore neighborhood -- "the corner" -- represented primarily by Fayette and Monroe streets, the site of one of numerous open-air drug markets in the area. But "the corner" is also an entity, in Simons' and Burns' telling, a being that draws residents to it, demands their money and daily commitment and ultimately consumes them in their daily quest for a "blast."
A clutch of characters the two reporters followed live at the heart of this big, vital book. Fran Boyd and Gary McCullough, each addicts, are parents to DeAndre McCullough, a teenager slipping toward the corner. In the course of the year DeAndre fathers a child with 14-year-old Tyreeka Freamon, ultimately all but abandoning them. Various members of DeAndre's crew and "touts" for the dealers slide in and out of the narrative, many of them drifting toward death or prison.
There is also a moving portrayal of Ella Thompson, a stubborn organizer of community resources who struggles mightily to wrest the underlying humanity she still sees in her neighborhood to the surface.
Throughout the book the authors keep the reader teetering on a razor's edge of fear and very slim hope. The people who inhabit "The Corner" are damaged people. As a middle-class person I found myself disappointed and angry when DeAndre blows off a job for no good reason or Fran struggles bravely toward kicking her habit but falls back or the tout "Fat Curt," gravely ill, fails to adhere to the medical care he so desperately needs. And we wonder why Gary, one of many members of a solid, hardworking family and a man who had gained a large measure of success and security in his life slid into an abyss of addiction.
"The Corner" is not without a point of view on this subject. The book is an indictment of the futility of the war on drugs, the ineptitude of the public school system and the frankly uncaring attitude of governments at all level toward people they view as expendable in the grand scheme of American life.
This book is painstakingly detailed, a masterpiece of sociological observation, but it is not a old, clinical report of a crumbling neighborhood. The authors look at what they see clearly and unflinchingly and allow the voices of their subjects to shine through. Those voices may make you uncomfortable, they may make you angry, they may make you nod in agreement, they may make you laugh. They are always real, and the authors' connection to them is obvious.
I am afraid that books like the "Corner," which portray urban life in the early and mid-90s, will more than ever be consigned to dusty library corners or the shelves of private collections like my own. Listen to the rhetoric of the 2012 presidential race and it's clear how completely the descendants of the characters on "The Corner" have been marginalized. While we wring our hands about "the middle class," another class continues to struggle, as it has for years, outside our view.
I was grateful for the small ray of hope that emerged at the end of "The Corner." Grateful because it had to fight its way through so many layers of the sadness that is at the heart of this unforgettable book.
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Customer reviews
I am forever indebted to David Simon, newspaperman, whose reporting and writing way back at the University of Maryland, College Park, inspired me to switch my major from pre-law to journalism (later to switch to liberal arts with an emphasis on U.S. history and American literature) and never look back. This extraordinary book remains my favorite work of post-@The Baltimore Sun journalism by Simon, whom I will always view, first, as a reporter’s reporter. Others wrote off the desperate addicts and low-level dealers on the corner in Baltimore. David Simon knew they, too, has stories to tell -- vitally important, Dickensian stories of urban America in the late 20th century. Nobody conveys the destructiveness of the racist war on drugs and its devastating consequences. From the first sentence, Simon’s prose proves riveting. The Corner reads like a novel, a tragic one, but one that offers hope we will eventually end this “war on the underclass,” this ‘holocaust in slow motion” and instead choose sanity, choose to save desperate souls instead of destroying yet another generation. Thank you, David Simon, newspaperman extraordinaire.
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Kindle Customer
Quite stunning
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 30, 2009Brian R. Martin
The Baltimore Drug Scene
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 30, 2009
Pablo
are able periodically to step back from the individual stories from the street that populate and illuminate this wonderful account of street life in Baltimore to deliver a ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 24, 2018
