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Toby's Reviews > The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood
by
by
With The Corner David Simon and Ed Burns have produced a fine journalistic example of documenting a living culture - the drug trade in one small area of Baltimore in 1993 - in a descriptively interesting manner that sheds some light on the whys and hows of the situation. As with Homicide you are immersed in the world of these people and you are horrified at the differences between you and them but at no point are they held up for ridicule; Simon and Burns are largely sympathetic in their honest portrayal of this lifestyle as only writers who have lived amongst their subjects truly can be.
My only problem is with my expectations, due to its links with the second greatest TV show ever made I wanted a book from both sides of this struggle, cops and robbers so to speak, and I didn't get that.
My only problem is with my expectations, due to its links with the second greatest TV show ever made I wanted a book from both sides of this struggle, cops and robbers so to speak, and I didn't get that.
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Quotes Toby Liked
“It isn't about the welfare check. It never was.
It isn't about sexual permissiveness, or personal morality, or failures in parenting, or lack of family planning. All of these are inherent in the disaster, but the purposefulness with which babies make babies in places like West Baltimore goes far beyond accident and chance, circumstance and misunderstanding. It's about more than the sexual drives of adolescents, too, though that might be hard to believe in a country where sex alone is enough of an argument to make anyone do just about anything.
In Baltimore, a city with the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, the epidemic is, at root, about human expectation, or more precisely, the absence of expectation.”
― The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
It isn't about sexual permissiveness, or personal morality, or failures in parenting, or lack of family planning. All of these are inherent in the disaster, but the purposefulness with which babies make babies in places like West Baltimore goes far beyond accident and chance, circumstance and misunderstanding. It's about more than the sexual drives of adolescents, too, though that might be hard to believe in a country where sex alone is enough of an argument to make anyone do just about anything.
In Baltimore, a city with the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, the epidemic is, at root, about human expectation, or more precisely, the absence of expectation.”
― The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
