The Corner: A Year In The Life Of An Inner-City Neighborhood (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
Ed Burns and David Simon's The Corner gave me a lot to think about. I really could not stop living in it, or talking about it to anyone who would pretend to listen to me (life before I wrote reviews on goodreads). Their journalistic approach of living with their subjects (in no way are the people within this account "subjects". I'm not good with word choices) for a year and being able to not leave their own footprint in was fascinating to me, for one thing. Not that it isn't hard to read about it. Well, it's always hard, I can make myself sick thinking about something like prison and trying to think of anything that could possibly help (I'm not that smart. Probably no one is). Yet, they don't pretend that they are not there. Their prescence is noted in the prose in what I thought was a different idea in storytelling. Not a documentary style, nor quite the omniprescent narrator either. It felt, to me, like they were the reader along with me finding it all so damned hard. I can't think of another book that made me feel that way. (The other book with a unique journalistic style that still felt oh so immediate to me was Nicolas Gage's Eleni, another favorite of mine.) I have the HBO tv movie version on dvd but have not yet seen it. The show employs a mockumentary style. I'm not keen on losing that special storytelling feel that their book had, to be honest.The background history of Baltimore and how the situation got to be that fucked up... Yes, quite a lot to think about. For example, this book supposes that the cheap price of cocaine was an extenuating circumstance in the rise of the drug problem in inner cities. That the families did not need the men as much (who would and did already buy heroin), and it was the cheap price of coke leading the women off the path as well was when the shit really hit the fan... I'd never thought about it from that stand point. Money, of course, is another (as Lester says on The Wire, follow the money trail). Kids started running drugs because they wouldn't have to do life sentences. Kids running the drug business on a fast food business level. Like Lord of the Flies for street violence, methinks. Kids raising kids and the kid breadwinners are dealers. When money moved out of the neighborhood (I'm out of shitty metaphors [for now]), the strings keeping it together went out. It goes back further than that. The Corner works as a great history book too. Why which community moved there, jobs... nothing happened that wasn't building up from every other day before it. The personal lives and motivations are the same. Except they are flesh and blood and one can hope (pray) that every other day before isn't how it is always going to be.The people are some I won't soon forget. Make no mistake, no matter at which lowest point they may be in, it is still always make it or break it time. The Corner ends on a lowest note. Fans of The Wire might recognize DeAndre as Brother Mouzon's assistant (the sadsack one who forgot his "Harper's Bazaar" magazine). Tyreeka appeared as an employee of the community college that Stringer Bell attended for his business courses. (I'm impressed how Ed Burns keeps in contact. Wire fans also know that he still talked to people whom he put away in prison for twenty years. It is because he actually gives a damn about his subjects, something that won't surprise anyone who knows his work.) It can go up and down again. Feeling why you really, really don't want it to is the point of reading a book like this one. The stakes were there no matter how it goes down. The soul, the heart (we're all going to die anyway so the ending can't be the point)... Gary's story is one of the most heartbreaking for me. That he had that mind and gave it all away to drugs. That he was aware of what he gave away and that wrong make it or break it choice happened repeatedly. There's an old man in my town who was not always retarded. He became mentally challenged after an attack. He remembers what it was like from before. That's what they make me think of, when they continue to choose this amputated life (and that goes for anything better they could be missing). I so wish it would get spontaneous and end differently for him. I can't bear it for anyone. I know what they are missing.
The Corner documents the intractability of the inner city drug culture and the pervasive hopelessness that charts the destinies of its citizens. Simon and Burns spend 1995 in a Baltimore neighborhood with an open drug market – the corner. They follow the everyday lives of the corner’s participants; the dealers, addicts and their families. The portrayals are heartfelt and heartbreaking. Drug infested communities are often approached as a problem but The Corner depicts them as a systemic self-reinforcing culture. We might find a solution to a problem, but where do we begin to change a culture that readily sustains and replenishes itself. Its victims often die in their teens or their twenties from drug related violence or drug induced illness. But they have already had children who are destined to take their place. Few escape the corner. Most are condemned to repeat the cycle.Simon and Burns have done an incredible job of bringing this bleak world to life for those of us who view it from afar through the media. Most of us in the suburbs and affluent sections of the city are just looking for ways to protect ourselves and our children. Today while we lament the victims of ISIS, we mostly ignore the victims of the corner. Partly this may be because we consider drug addiction a choice, but the authors show that this choice is an illusion. Children are raised by children who are themselves already addicts. There is only one life they know and can fit into – life on the corner. The authors make clear those growing up in the thousands of corners throughout America are a human tragedy of grand proportions. As Simon and Burns realized in 1995 and as we are finally coming to accept today, we can’t arrest and incarcerate away the problem. There isn’t jail space enough. The war on drugs, drug enforcement agencies with huge budgets, mandatory sentences are not only doomed to fail, they undermine the police agencies they were designed to help. Meeting an officer’s quota by locking up street dealers and frisking every bystander not only inflames the entire community as we have recently witnessed in Baltimore but it is ineffective. This is because the real issue is the drug culture not the drug transaction. As the authors put it: We want it to be about nothing more complicated than cash money and human greed, when at bottom, it’s about a reason to believe. We want to think that it’s chemical, that it’s all about the addictive mind, when instead it has become about validation, about lost souls assuring themselves that a daily relevance can be found at the fine point of a disposable syringe.Our politicians, police and pundits typically offer up self-serving opinions and answers that aren’t answers at all. Unfortunately, Simon and Burns offer no solutions of their own. Now 20 years later in 2015 Baltimore has flared into violence as racial bias and overly aggressive policing led to civil unrest. Yet while everyone wants fixes that will quell the protests, the deeper underlying issues of the corner at the heart of that Baltimore community seem to be forgotten.
What do You think about The Corner: A Year In The Life Of An Inner-City Neighborhood (1998)?
Books don't get much more powerful or moving than this. The premise is simple--Baltimore Sun reporter Simon (who's lately been earning acclaim as the driving force behind HBO's "The Wire" which takes place in the same area)and Ed Burns spent a year living on or around one of the busiest drug markets in Baltimore and reports what he learned. In doing so, he tells the stories of the people who inhabit this world: street pushers, kids trying (although often not that hard) to stay straight and the parents who worry about them, when they're not too busy trying to score their next fix. The stories are harrowing--from people who spend their days cashing in scrap metal for cash to get hooked up, to families sharing one small bedroom in a shooting gallery. Pretty much everybody is hoping for a change in fortunes, but the book offers few happy endings. In spite of this, its a fascinating glimpse of a world where most of Simon's readers will never go. The narrative is occasionally broken up by Simon and Burns' musings about the war on drugs. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, its hard to disagree with Simon's belief that the war has failed, at least in his little corner of the world. There's a particularly powerful passage near the end where Simon flat out shatters the Horatio Alger myths that many middle-class suburbanites cling to, particularly the idea that should they find themselves in that situation, they'd simply apply a little Puritan gumption and work their way out their unfortunate circumstances. In the end, he doesn't offer any solutions and precious little hope. Yet, the people who live there are more than mindless junkies. They're human, with hopes and dreams and stories to tell. Perhaps Simon's greatest achievement is the way in which he employs his sharp eye and powers of observation to paint a wholly three-dimensional and, given the circumstances, refreshingly non-judgmental picture of a community in deep decline. In the end, its an amazing powerful read, one that will leave readers deeply affected and likely having shed at least a couple of tears along the way.
—C.E.
I have the unique perspective of having lived on "The Corner" for a year, and in the neighborhood for two more. My review might be biased because I don't have the luxury of distancing myself from the characters or saying "such and such was probably embellished for dramatic flair."The characters in The Corner are real people struggling to live "normal" lives in the face of circumstances that 99% of us would consider absolutely unacceptable. Burns and Simon stay with each character long enough to break through their one-dimensional exterior that makes it easy for us on the "outside" to dismiss. They paint a picture of injustice, ignorance, selfishness, selflessness, hopelessness, hopefulness, and finally - humanity.Despite how raw, true, and honest this book is, don't expect it to offer a simple conclusion or resolution to chronic poverty and drug use. Expect to simply sit with each of these people and see their real humanity break through. The easy labels we use to categorize good guys and bad guys melt away and we find ourselves confronted with stories that share similarities with our own. The drug dealer becomes a father. The drug fiend becomes a mother. The slut becomes a daughter. The criminal becomes a son. This corner doesn't have to be in Baltimore in the early 90s. There's a corner in every city in every age. The drug of choice may change every once in a while; the welfare system may receive an overhaul every few years, but on the streets, in the houses, and on the corner sit our brothers and sisters in humanity.
—Stephen
A staggeringly good book, following a family and their friends living in the bowels of hell – a few blocks of West Baltimore’s drug district. A focused look at a tiny facet of the USA’s huge problem - not trying to find solutions, because maybe there aren’t any.My only complaint with this book was at times, the authors gave their opinions on the sociological history and impacts of this horrible situation – when I really just wanted to get back to the McCullough family in the hope there’d be some happy ending! Don’t hold your breath, this is a true story unfortunately. An amazing piece of work.
—Matt
