I Still Can Read


The Corner, Homicide, Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail

Been on a David Simon kick in the past few months. Considering I believe he has only written two books, it is much of a Simon kick anyone can have.
I read The Corner first. A narrative of a year on a drug corner in Baltimore, interspersed with occasional passages of outrage at the public policies that allow the War On Drugs that continue to create the bombed out drug corners.
I'm not done with Homicide, Simon's earlier document of a year with Baltimore murder police. It's as good as I expected. I think HBO's The Wire borrows more faithfully from Homicide than the NBC series did (at least after the first season). The Wire also illustrates most of the outrages in The Corner - cribbing in the Third Season a couple pages of Simon and Norton's outrage at the futility of drug enforcement in the "paper bag speech" given by a police commander before he "legalizes" drugs.

Finally, I'm ripping through Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail. Like "The DaVinci Code" as written by Terry Pratchett, only IT IS ALL TRUE! Or is it? Doesn't matter, cause it is entertaining as hell, and the magnitude of how much greater it is than David Brown's opus can be expressed only in scientific notation.

Posted: Sun - July 16, 2006 at 02:20 PM           |

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