ZenHalfTimeCrock
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 18 Apr 2019
- Messages
- 1,264
- Team supported
- Manchester City
Although this is an old thread, I am glad that it has been revived. There are some excellent previous recommendations (Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis, Jon Ronson).
Anyway, just finished this:
All the way through, I assumed that the main characters and events were fictitious. This is because - at certain points - the authors give accounts of what was going on in the minds of the people they were writing about, conveying their subjective impressions as it were, to a degree that seemed impossible in a work of non-fiction.
Turns out that they were all real. Everything that happens, happened. This makes the book a truly remarkable ethnographic study, perhaps the best that I have ever read. At the end, you will find out how Simon and Burns were able to write such an intimate, humanising portrait of the inhabitants of West Baltimore. I can also see now why the subjects of the book deserved to be treated at such length.
Given his subsequent extraordinary work in television, David Simon is worthy of the Nobel prize for literature in my view. And his recent, ferocious attacks on Trump in the wake of the comments the President made about the community depicted in this publication are all the more understandable, given that he and Burns succeed in arousing a good deal of 'sympathy for the Devil' on the part of the reader when it comes the the damaged, dysfunctional wannabe gangstas and unrelenting, manipulative drugs fiends who haunt these pages.
Above all, the book shows that there are no easy solutions to the systemic problems of drugs, violence and poverty that afflict communities like the one depicted.
Anyway, just finished this:
All the way through, I assumed that the main characters and events were fictitious. This is because - at certain points - the authors give accounts of what was going on in the minds of the people they were writing about, conveying their subjective impressions as it were, to a degree that seemed impossible in a work of non-fiction.
Turns out that they were all real. Everything that happens, happened. This makes the book a truly remarkable ethnographic study, perhaps the best that I have ever read. At the end, you will find out how Simon and Burns were able to write such an intimate, humanising portrait of the inhabitants of West Baltimore. I can also see now why the subjects of the book deserved to be treated at such length.
Given his subsequent extraordinary work in television, David Simon is worthy of the Nobel prize for literature in my view. And his recent, ferocious attacks on Trump in the wake of the comments the President made about the community depicted in this publication are all the more understandable, given that he and Burns succeed in arousing a good deal of 'sympathy for the Devil' on the part of the reader when it comes the the damaged, dysfunctional wannabe gangstas and unrelenting, manipulative drugs fiends who haunt these pages.
Above all, the book shows that there are no easy solutions to the systemic problems of drugs, violence and poverty that afflict communities like the one depicted.