[Book Reviews] "The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood"
I have recently finished David Simon's "The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood", which is one of the better nonfiction books I've read in some time. Simon is a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and the guy behind The Wire. This book was a project of his to understand what life is like for people living in the heart of Baltimore's inner city drug culture -- he basically plunked himself and his co-author down at the intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets, got to know the people, and stayed there for about a year.
I think one of the reasons that the book succeeds is that it's fundamentally about people. He doesn't populate his pre-existing points with anecdotes about real people that happen to fulfill them, he just tells you what their lives are like. You get to know them and to sympathize with them, and that makes for a much more powerful story than a bare recounting of facts or a rant about the failures of urban policy decisions. Not that you don't get a hefty dose of the latter by association -- from the seemingly haphazard police raids and arrests of just about anybody to the "jails too full" nature of the justice systems sentencing, from the aggressive prosecution of a domestic violence complaint that was made up by the "victim" out of spite because her boyfriend wouldn't share his high to the utter insufficiency of social services and the extraordinary difficulty of getting and keeping a straight job in the face of that environment, you get a painful awareness of why the dog-eat-dog world feeds on itself and anyone it can pull in.
Many of the inner city stories that I've seen try to glamourize these problems, making a philosophy of tougher-than-thou. Simon manages to avoid that tone, instead showing how compassion will get you screwed over in a death of a thousand cuts, from the well-meaning dope fiend Gary to the community center organizer Miss Ella. It's a hard, hard read if you're the kind of person who's out to save the world. And yet there was a lot to recognize there from my own interactions with people in similar straits. (Ask me about our former handyman sometime, who came around hollering at the door and demanding that we give him work whenever he needed money. He got more and more insistent, and I was trying to maintain at least polite cordial relations while still saying no when we didn't actually need any work done. That was not what he was trying to hear -- he wanted money and knew we had it, and he was going to do whatever it took to get it out of us. He was in and out of jail all the time. Eventually he broke the lock off our tool shed, stole my mountain bike, and then carefully replaced it with another lock. Jerk. But I can't see anything that I could have done that would have prevented that, other than realizing that keeping something valuable in a locked place that only I had the key to was insufficient. Security fail. At the least, he never came back after that... but if I'd lived there longer, I'm sure he would have.) So in many cases, tougher-than-thou simply becomes more heartless than thou. And it works.
It was interesting to see a well documented discussion of inner city crime without a major gang presence. Sure, there were a thousand small crews, but the violence and crime that you do see is commensurate with my experiences in bad areas. There are stick-up artists and muggers, but most of the people involved with them are kind of amateurish and not very good at it. Not every mugger with a gun is a hardened criminal... really, most of them aren't. They want their next high and they're opportunistic, but if you look like a hard target you're less likely to have problems. It's still dangerous and sometimes you get unlucky, but it's not the all-crime-all-the-time dangerfest that most people with little experience of inner cities envision when looking at places like that. Still, don't go walking there like a tourist to see the charming criminal people or anything (I've known stupider), but it was a nice reality check.
Simon does occasionally diverge into policy rhetoric, but (even though I mostly agree with him) I am pleased that those sections are smaller tangents off the larger narrative. Yes, the war on drugs has been a dismal failure, with immense human costs. One look at West Baltimore will tell you that. Yes, the idea of community policing and intimate knowledge of the residents sounds good in theory, but is itself insufficient to the task thereof. (I would particularly welcome hearing opinions on that from the LEOs reading.) But by and large, he allows his points to make themselves. I wonder how much my mostly-agreeing biases my read, because by the time he gets to the declaiming sections, I'm already thinking "duh, why do you even need to say that". I'd be interested to see how people who think differently take the book as a whole, and those sections in particular.
Five thought-provoking and reality-checking stars out of five. Particularly recommended for people with an interest in urban grit, or for people who have spent some time in Baltimore.
I think one of the reasons that the book succeeds is that it's fundamentally about people. He doesn't populate his pre-existing points with anecdotes about real people that happen to fulfill them, he just tells you what their lives are like. You get to know them and to sympathize with them, and that makes for a much more powerful story than a bare recounting of facts or a rant about the failures of urban policy decisions. Not that you don't get a hefty dose of the latter by association -- from the seemingly haphazard police raids and arrests of just about anybody to the "jails too full" nature of the justice systems sentencing, from the aggressive prosecution of a domestic violence complaint that was made up by the "victim" out of spite because her boyfriend wouldn't share his high to the utter insufficiency of social services and the extraordinary difficulty of getting and keeping a straight job in the face of that environment, you get a painful awareness of why the dog-eat-dog world feeds on itself and anyone it can pull in.
Many of the inner city stories that I've seen try to glamourize these problems, making a philosophy of tougher-than-thou. Simon manages to avoid that tone, instead showing how compassion will get you screwed over in a death of a thousand cuts, from the well-meaning dope fiend Gary to the community center organizer Miss Ella. It's a hard, hard read if you're the kind of person who's out to save the world. And yet there was a lot to recognize there from my own interactions with people in similar straits. (Ask me about our former handyman sometime, who came around hollering at the door and demanding that we give him work whenever he needed money. He got more and more insistent, and I was trying to maintain at least polite cordial relations while still saying no when we didn't actually need any work done. That was not what he was trying to hear -- he wanted money and knew we had it, and he was going to do whatever it took to get it out of us. He was in and out of jail all the time. Eventually he broke the lock off our tool shed, stole my mountain bike, and then carefully replaced it with another lock. Jerk. But I can't see anything that I could have done that would have prevented that, other than realizing that keeping something valuable in a locked place that only I had the key to was insufficient. Security fail. At the least, he never came back after that... but if I'd lived there longer, I'm sure he would have.) So in many cases, tougher-than-thou simply becomes more heartless than thou. And it works.
It was interesting to see a well documented discussion of inner city crime without a major gang presence. Sure, there were a thousand small crews, but the violence and crime that you do see is commensurate with my experiences in bad areas. There are stick-up artists and muggers, but most of the people involved with them are kind of amateurish and not very good at it. Not every mugger with a gun is a hardened criminal... really, most of them aren't. They want their next high and they're opportunistic, but if you look like a hard target you're less likely to have problems. It's still dangerous and sometimes you get unlucky, but it's not the all-crime-all-the-time dangerfest that most people with little experience of inner cities envision when looking at places like that. Still, don't go walking there like a tourist to see the charming criminal people or anything (I've known stupider), but it was a nice reality check.
Simon does occasionally diverge into policy rhetoric, but (even though I mostly agree with him) I am pleased that those sections are smaller tangents off the larger narrative. Yes, the war on drugs has been a dismal failure, with immense human costs. One look at West Baltimore will tell you that. Yes, the idea of community policing and intimate knowledge of the residents sounds good in theory, but is itself insufficient to the task thereof. (I would particularly welcome hearing opinions on that from the LEOs reading.) But by and large, he allows his points to make themselves. I wonder how much my mostly-agreeing biases my read, because by the time he gets to the declaiming sections, I'm already thinking "duh, why do you even need to say that". I'd be interested to see how people who think differently take the book as a whole, and those sections in particular.
Five thought-provoking and reality-checking stars out of five. Particularly recommended for people with an interest in urban grit, or for people who have spent some time in Baltimore.