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Poem at Central Booking
By DeAndre McCullough
Silent screams and broken dreams
Addicts, junkies, pushers and fiends
Crowded spaces and sad faces
Never look back as the police chase us
Consumed slowly by chaos, a victim of the
streets,
Hungry for knowledge, but afraid to eat.
A life of destruction, it seems no one
cares,
A manchild alone with burdens to bear.
Trapped in a life of crime and hate,
It seems the ghetto will be my fate.
If I had just one wish it would surely be,
That God would send angels to set me free
Free from the madness, of a city running
wild,
Freed from the life of a ghetto child.
Source:
The Corner
(1997) by David Simon and Edward Burns |
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The Corner
The
bleak reality of drug addiction is
captured with unflinching authenticity
in
The Corner, an excellent,
reality-based HBO miniseries. Having
lived on the streets of West Baltimore,
Maryland, where this compelling drama
takes place, actor-director Charles S.
Dutton knows the territory, physically,
socially, and emotionally, and his
compassionate approach is vital to the
series' success. Dutton cares for his
characters deeply enough to give them a
realistic shred of hope, even when hope
is consistently dashed by the ravages of
addiction. This is, at its root, a
family tragedy, focusing on errant
father Gary (T.K. Carter, in a
heartbreaking performance) a
once-successful investor trapped in a
tailspin of heroin dependency. His
estranged wife Fran (Khandi Alexander)
was the first to get hooked, and she's
struggling to get clean, while their
15-year-old son DeAndre (Sean Nelson,
from the indie hit Fresh) deals drugs,
temporarily avoiding their deadly allure
while facing the challenge of premature
fatherhood. |
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Through revealing flashbacks and numerous local
characters, we see the explicit fallout of addiction, and while violence
occasionally erupts, its constant threat is secondary to Dutton's
dramatic vision, which remains steadfastly alert to the humanity and
neglected potential of these lost and searching souls.
The Corner is, essentially, the civilian flipside of HBO's
equally laudable series
The Wire,
which approaches a similar neighborhood from a police-squad perspective.
Performances are uniformly superb, details are uncannily perfect, and
for all of its human horror,
The Corner is riveting, not depressing. A closing interview with
the characters' real-life counterparts bears witness to the fact that
these lives--with inevitable exceptions--need not be lost forever.—Jeff
Shannon,
Amazon.com
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The Corner (YouTube video)
The Corner is a 2000 HBO
television miniseries based on the book
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City
Neighborhood by David Simon and Ed Burns and
adapted for television by Simon and David Mills. The
Corner chronicles the life of a family living in
poverty amid the open-air drug markets of West
Baltimore.
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City
Neighborhood
This is a powerful book, a
window on aspects of America most people would
rather ignore. To their great credit, the
authors--David Simon wrote
Homicide, the basis for the popular television
show; Edward Burns is a former Baltimore police
officer, now a public school teacher--refuse to
sensationalize their subject or make its people into
stereotypes. |
For a year the two hung out in a West
Baltimore neighborhood that was a center of the drug trade. At
the center of the narrative is the McCullough family—DeAndre,
age 15, and his drug-addicted parents, Gary and Fran. While
reading
The Corner, there are times when we pity them,
times when they make us angry. The book's strength, though, is
that we always understand them.
This portrayal of a year in drug-crazed West
Baltimore will satisfy neither readers looking for a perceptive
witness to the urban crisis nor those in search of social
analysis. Simon (Homicide,
LJ 6/1/91), a crime reporter, and Burns, a Baltimore police
veteran and public school teacher, mask their presence in the
scene with an omniscient style that strains credibility, and the
chronological framework blunts the impact of their most
compelling themes. The authors salute the courageous but futile
efforts of individual parents, educators, and police officers
but deny the possibility of a social solution to the devastation
they acknowledge is rooted in social policy. A more compelling
account is
Our America: Life and Death (LJ 6/1/97) on the South
Side of Chicago, based on interviews conducted by 13-year-old
public housing residents LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman in 1993.
For larger public libraries.—Library Journal
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The
Corner—DeAndre and Prop Joe
The Corner—The Real Fran, DeAndre, Tyreeka and Blue!
The last ten minutes from the HBO series
The Corner, where Charles S. Dutton, the director talks
to the real life characters, the story was based on.
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Civilization: The West and the Rest
By Niall Ferguson
The rise to global predominance of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five hundred years. All over the world, an astonishing proportion of people now work for Western-style companies, study at Western-style universities, vote for Western-style governments, take Western medicines, wear Western clothes, and even work Western hours. Yet six hundred years ago the petty kingdoms of Western Europe seemed unlikely to achieve much more than perpetual internecine warfare. It was Ming China or Ottoman Turkey that had the look of world civilizations. How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? In Civilization: The West and the Rest, bestselling author Niall Ferguson argues that, beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts that the Rest lacked: competition, science, the rule of law, consumerism, modern medicine, and the work ethic. These were the "killer applications" that allowed the West to leap ahead of the Rest, opening global trade routes, exploiting newly discovered scientific laws, evolving a system of representative government, more than doubling life expectancy, unleashing the Industrial Revolution, and embracing a dynamic work ethic.
Civilization shows just how fewer than a dozen Western empires came to control more than half of humanity and four fifths of the world economy.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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What This Cruel War Was Over
Soldiers Slavery and the Civil
War
By Chandra Manning
For this impressively researched
Civil War social history, Georgetown
assistant history professor Manning
visited more than two dozen states
to comb though archives and
libraries for primary source
material, mostly diaries and letters
of men who fought on both sides in
the Civil War, along with more than
100 regimental newspapers. The
result is an engagingly written,
convincingly argued social history
with a point—that those who did the
fighting in the Union and
Confederate armies "plainly
identified slavery as the root of
the Civil War." Manning backs up her
contention with hundreds of
first-person testimonies written at
the time, rather than
often-unreliable after-the-fact
memoirs. While most Civil War
narratives lean heavily on officers,
Easterners and men who fought in
Virginia, Manning casts a much
broader net. She includes
immigrants, African-Americans and
western fighters, in order, she
says, "to approximate cross sections
of the actual Union and Confederate
ranks." Based on the author's
dissertation, the book is free of
academese and appeals to a general
audience, though Manning's harsh
condemnation of white Southerners'
feelings about slavery and her
unstinting praise of Union soldiers'
"commitment to emancipation" take a
step beyond scholarly objectivity.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
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2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
25 March 2012
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