The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood.

• Author: Bogira, Steve

What is clear about the drug war is that nothing so far has worked. Despite billions spent mainly on cops and prisons, the dealing on inner-city streets persists.

"Against all the sanction we can muster, this new world is surviving, expanding, consuming everything in its path," write David Simon and Edward Burns. It's time to go back to square one, they say, to "shed our fixed perceptions" and take a fresh look at the problem "from the inside."

Which is what Simon and Burns give us in telling detail in The Corner, a look at drug dealing on the streets of West Baltimore, told from the point of view of the users and dealers themselves. One of the "fixed perceptions" the authors challenge is the idea that those involved in the drug life have mainly themselves to blame -- that they freely chose to use or deal. Consider the book's main character, 15-year-old DeAndre McCullough. DeAndre grew up on a street where voices day and night chime out "Killer Bee," "Lethal Weapon," "Tec Nine," or whatever brand of heroin or cocaine is being hawked that day. Gaunt figures stumble down to the corners to cop. DeAndre's mother is one of these. Others slink into abandoned, urine-stinking rowhouses to fire home their dope. His father is one of these.

DeAndre lives with his mother and younger brother in an 8' x 10' room in a three-story rowhouse. Various uncles and aunts, most of them addicts like his mother, inhabit the rest of the building; the hallways are heavily trafficked by dope fiends. When DeAndre ends up on the corner, slinging packages and vials, is it really that surprising?

He should be in school, of course; he should be thinking about tomorrow. But people are dropping dead at a young age all around him -- from bullets, overdoses, and the Bug. Maybe he'd think more about his future if it were clear he had one. DeAndre makes money quickly on the corner, and spends it just as fast, on name-brand clothes, marijuana, and Happy Meals. But the corner offers more than money, the authors write; its people are also "cultivating meaning in a world that has declared them irrelevant. ... In this place only, they belong. In this place only, they know what they are, why they are and what it is that they are supposed to do. Here, they almost matter."

Anthropologist Elliot Liebow noted a similar quest for meaning on inner-city streets 30 years ago in his classic, Tally's Corner. "The desire to be a person in his own right, to be noticed by the world he lives in, is...