From this book, series creator, Paul Attanasio, imagined the perils of a Homicide crew would be interesting to the general public. Add to that mixture, Barry Levinson, Tom Fontana, and Henry Bromell, and with the magic of Jean De Segonzac, and you have the current intellectual course of the show we now hold near and dear to our hearts.
This book, as you can imagine, profoundly changed something in us. As a result, I can imagine that you would love to get a copy of it. Here's all the pertinent information on it:
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
by David Simon
Ivy Books (published by Ballantine Books)
ISBN # 0-8041-0999-0
© 1991
Mr. Simon wrote the book while he was a reporter for The Balitmore Sun. He took a year off from working with the Sun, to tag along with one particular shift of detectives for the Baltimore City Police, Homicide Division. That was in 1987. He then took the rest of the time to compile everything into the format which you are currently reading about. Since then, Mr. Simon has left the Sun. He currently is a staff writer, as well as a producer for Homicide: Life on the Street. He also has written an episode of NYPD Blue entitled: Hollie and the Blowfish.
10 Rules from the Homicide
Lexicon
How the Game is played.
BDD was nice enough to give me an advance copy to plug. It's extremely well done. It is about 6 hours long, and they did edit the book in order to squeeze it into 6 hours. Reed Diamond is a nice surprise. He's very amusing when he trys to mimic other voices to differentiate characters.
The biggest drawback to the audio book is that it doesn't really mention the LaTonya Wallace case. The Latoya Wallace case was the basis for the Adena Watson case on the television show Homicide: Life on the Street.
David Simon and Edward Burns spent more than a year hanging out on a poverty-stricken corner of West Baltimore; what they witnessed there was a reality most Americans only hear about on the evening news. In The Corner, the chronicle of their time spent at the intersection of Fayette and Monroe, Simon and Burns have fashioned a gripping portrait of one drug-haunted inner-city neighborhood and the complex human beings who inhabit it. DeAndre McCullough, a young dealer who only rarely pretends to attend junior high school; Ella Thompson, a kindly woman who spends her days running a local recreation center and attending the funerals of young men from the neighborhood; and Gary McCullough, DeAndre's father, a man who once had it all--including a fat stock portfolio and a Mercedes--but let it slip away in the grip of addiction. Told from the perspective of these figures and others like them, The Corner is a work of powerful social criticism that reads like a novel. Simon, author of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, and Burns, a former police detective, write with honesty and compassion, giving a human face to what is all too often a parade of grim statistics. In the end, however, what they call their "stand-around-and-watch" journalism yields many questions but no answers.
Here's the Pertinent information on buying the book:
The Corner : A Year in the Life of an Inner-City
Neighborhood
by David Simon and Edward Burns
Published by Broadway Books
ISBN # 0-7679-0030-8
© 1997
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood will break your heart. Throughout the book, you keep pulling for people to get out of the hole, to get ahead, and they never do. That's not quite true. Some do. Some manage to make their lives better. But, this book will break your heart.
Along the way, the book has mini-essays which cover interesting inner city topics such as how basketball is a saving grace for inner city youth, brand consciousness and what it means, as well as how the crew replaces the mostly non-existant family. Not only is this book a terrarium study of an open air drug market, it's also a sociological look at the culture that open air drug market spawns. Jason-Bob says it's good.
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