The Corner

Reviews / Votes

A towering achievement. By narrowing their focus to a single American inner-city neighbourhood, Simon and Burns end up telling something broader in scope, even epic. These singular stories of tragedy and triumph, love and despair tell us more about what's plaguing big cities than a thousand studies. The Corner should be required reading for every public official in America - and beyond. The rest of us will simply read The Corner because it is more touching, mesmerising, maddening, heartbreaking and, ultimately, profound than anything we're likely to encounter in fiction. -- Linwood Barclay, author of NO TIME FOR GOODBYE THE CORNER is an intimate, intense dispatch from the broken heart of urban America. It is impossible to read these pages and not feel stunned at the high price, in human potential, in thwarted aspirations, that simple survival on the streets of West Baltimore demands of its citizens. An important document, as devastating as it is lucid. * * Richard Price, author of CLOCKERS * * Brave, unblinkered, and heartbreaking. * * New York Times Book Review * * THE CORNER is a remarkable book--very tough, very demanding, very rewarding. Some of it is brutal and all of it is heartbreaking. As a reporter, I can only stand back and admire David Simon and Edward Burns for an amazing piece of reportage. To be there for an entire year, to make sense of random events and a list of characters long enough to make Charles Dickens envious, and to write coherently--it's a breathtaking achievement. And they manage to make West Baltimore as much a character as any of the flesh-and-blood people in the book. * * Glenn Frankel, author of BEYOND THE PROMISED LAND * * If you want to understand street-corner life in the inner city, you should read THE CORNER, an amazingly intimate, detailed work of reporting that makes human and vivid a world that outsiders ordinarily are forced to learn about through statistics, sound bites, and stereotypes. * * Nicholas Lemann, author of THE PROMISED LAND * * The most provocative account from a casualty-strewn frontline since the choppers left Saigon . . . The viscerally affecting nature of the narrative makes it more powerful than any observational sociology . . . the characters of The Corner step past raw facts and make the reader feel their lives, contradictions and desperations. There is poetry here, even tenderness. -- Tom Lappin * * Herald * * If The Wire has given you Baltimore fever, read this chunky, streetwise, drug-littered piece of reportage by the hard-hitting show's creators. * * The Times * * Excellent . . . Gritty and highly engaging, start this book and you will think of nothing else until you are finished * * Sunday Business Post * * The Corner is an incredible piece of journalism. A gripping and at times painful read, it provides an insight into an unfamiliar world that society has largely forgotten, engendering a surprising amount of empathy for those whose only concern is where their next fix is coming from. * * Irish Tribune * * A true story as thrilling and intense as any psycho-drama . . . This engrossing slice of social journalism is a tour de force that manages to humanise its subjects without exploiting them. -- Emma Rubach * * Big Issue * * A powerful work . . . beautifully written, by turns evocative and simmeringly angry. -- Sean O'Hagan * * Observer * * A profoundly moving and intelligent piece of social history . . . Simon and Burns' greatest skill is in humanizing these corner residents . . . A decade late, but worth the wait. -- Peter Watts * * Time Out * * Simon and his collaborator Ed Burns are at once professionally distanced and compassionate . . . and their scrupulous detail adds dimension and clarity to the profound social problems they are tackling. * * Metro * * The Corner - bristling with humanity and inhumanity - stands as an unblinking portrayal of how people organise themselves when cast adrift from the conventions of society. -- Giles Broadbent * * Wharf * * Gritty and highly engaging, start this book and you will think of nothing else until you are finished. * * Sunday Business Post * * An amazingly clear-eyed, yet sympathetic portrait of the American underclass. -- Sameer Rahim * * Daily Telegraph * *