West Baltimore, Fayette and Monroe: the corner. On this forgotten
intersection, the American dream has crumbled to a nightmare. Here, the
full price of the drug culture is being paid — yet, surprisingly, it can
also be a place of hope, caring, and love.
This extraordinary book tells the searing true story of one year in the
life of an inner-city neighborhood.
Written by David Simon, the award-winning author of "Homicide, " and
Edward Burns, a former police detective, it follows a handful of people
who must struggle mightily just to survive — let alone escape — the drug
market that fuels their world. At the center of the narrative is
fifteen-year-old DeAndre McCullough. DeAndre's parents, Gary and Fran,
were once poised, against all odds, to pull themselves up and out of
West Baltimore. But when they themselves stumble and then succumb to the
corner's temptations, DeAndre's future hangs in the balance. Smart and
streetwise, he is both drawn to and wary of the drug trade that
flourishes beyond his rowhouse steps. Can he rise above his parents'
addiction, or will he, too, become a casualty of the corner?
In telling the story of DeAndre and his broken family, Simon and Burns
open up the complex world of the corner and its unforgettable
characters. It's a place of predators and their prey, of slingers and
touts, of stickup boys and shooting gallery nurses, of ambivalent
police, helpless users, and innocent bystanders. But it is also,
incredibly, a place of fragile hope. Fat Curt, an aging drug tout,
remembers the corner as a kinder place, and tries to protect his
customers from weak or dangerous product. R.C., a troubled teenager,
finds refuge from hischaotic life within the basketball court's magic
boundaries. Ella, a longtime resident, runs the recreation center for
the corner's children, shielding them as best she can from what lies
outside the playground's chain-link fence. Amid so much desperation,
decency still flickers, poignantly, across the corner's blasted
landscape.
More vividly than any recent book, "The Corner" captures an America of
which many of us are only dimly aware. Through the prism of just one
desolate crossroads, Simon and Burns offer chilling assessments of why
law enforcement policies, moral crusades, and the welfare system have
done so little for our inner cities. Deeply moving and unflinchingly
real, "The Corner" will forever alter our view of the so-called war on
drugs, even as it compels us to look deep into the hearts and minds of
all those who live in America's abandoned places.
David Simon is the author of the bestselling "Homicide: A Year on the
Killing Streets, " which won an Edgar Award and inspired Barry
Levinson's Emmy Award winning television program of the same name. A
freelance writer based in Baltimore, he is also a writer and producer
for "Homicide" and received the 1994 Writer's Guild for America Award
for outstanding script in an episodic television drama.
A teacher in the Baltimore public school system, "Edward Burns" retired
after serving twenty years in the city police department. For much of
that time, he worked as a detective in the homicide unit.
