When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era - Donovan X. Ramsey

I’d wanted someone to write this book for a long time.

I’m lucky enough to have grown up in a neighbourhood more or less untouched by the crack epidemic, but I was alive during its peak, too young to understand exactly what crack was or what it did, but old enough to catch the wave of fear and disdain that emanated from its use. Mostly this filtered through hyperbolic news coverage and sappy TV plotlines, but it entered general discourse too. Kids used crackhead as a slur for a poor or mentally unwell person, and I knew a “crack baby” was a child born broken in some fundamental way. But I never understood why crack emerged so abruptly, ravaged communities so thoroughly, and why it seemed to ebb away even as I became aware of it.

Donovan X. Ramsey does a great job answering these questions, and a lot more besides. When Crack Was King takes a broad lens to the crack epidemic, reaching back to the Great Migration and Nixon’s War on Drugs to explain how the impoverished, largely Black population of America’s inner cities became uniquely vulnerable to the drug, documents the rise in cocaine’s availability that dropped the price enough for regular people to afford it, and the chemical innovations that freed cocaine from its powdered form, first through the complex and dangerous method of free base, and later through the much simpler form of crack. Ramsey meticulously discusses the policy decisions of each administration, how each party’s desire to be “touch of crime” led to an ever-tightening spiral of restrictions and harsher sentences. He also gives a simple and compelling reason for why crack petered out the way it did: its addiction was so ravaging and destructive that the kids growing up around the first generation of addicts were scared off for fear of becoming the second.

As good as Ramsey is at the wide lens, When Crack Was King is at it’s core a book about four people whose lives were touched by the crack epidemic: Elgin Swift, the son of an addict who grew up in a Yonkers neighbourhood ravaged by crack; Lennie Woodley, an addict herself who overcame an appallingly abusive childhood and years as a sex worker to become an advocate for addicts in recovery; Kurt Schmoke, the mayor of Baltimore, who fought the Tough on Crime tide in an effort to put compassion and treatment into the city’s response to the epidemic; and Shawn McCray, a basketball prodigy and ace student who sold crack and became part of an infamous Newark gang called the Zoo Crew. Ramsey’s portraits of the four are unfailingly sympathetic yet honest, not flinching from the failures and bad decisions they sometimes made—that we all make, and that those more fortunate among us can afford to make without serious consequences.

Ramsey’s prose is engaging and evocative without being flowery. He captures the mood of a troubled era in American history in an illuminating way. This book was excellent.

Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce

I’ve never seen Cool Hand Luke, and was only aware of it from pop culture references until picking up Donn Pearce’s novel. I didn’t know what to expect beyond it being about a nonconformist prisoner who eats a lot of eggs. As a novel, it exceeded my expectations, narrrated in a dreamy, impressionistic style by a man named Sailor, about whom we know almost nothing.

Cool Hand Luke uses first person pedestal narration. which is a writing workshop way of saying that the narrator is a character but not the main one. The narrrator can feature prominently (think Fifth Business or To Kill a Mockingbird) or tangentially (think the Great Gatsby or Breakfast at Tiffany’s) but they are not the protagonist. Rather, the serve to bear witness to the protagonist, who is usually a tragic figure. In Cool Hand Luke, the narrator is kept so vague that he is barely a character—chapters can go by when you forget that he’s in the story, and not just a disembodied voice telling it. This feelign is underscored by the prose, which uses a non-colloquial poetic diction to convey scenes.

This is contrasted with portions narrated by another inmate, Dragline, who accompanied Luke on his final, fatal escap eattempt. Much of the novel is actually takign place during one of Dragline’s retelling of this episode to new inmates, though Sailor, our ghostly narrator, gives his version of events for much of the same period. There’s no line breaks or even dialogue tags to indicate who is speaking, but Pearce handles the transitions well with his command of vernacular dialogue. It’s always quite clear when we’re listening to Dragline or Luke and when we’re listening to Sailor.

The story is itself fairly simple, mostly the arc of Luke’s arrival at the prison, ascension to a place of honor among the inmates, and a gnawing dissatisfaction that forces him to escape again and again wtih a desperation that flirts wit hthe suicidal. The story is well realised and well told. A truly excellent novel. I’m surprised Pearce didn’t write more, though it seems he only published another two before taking a prolonged hiatus to do other work. I’ll have to seek these out at some point.

Billy Summers - Stephen King

I find it hard to believe that this is my first post about a Stephen King book, which would suggest I’ve gone nearly two years without reading anything by him. I know I’ve missed most of his newest stuff, but I usually reread something of his on a fairly regular basis. In any case, it was a welcome return to my first favourite author, and the writer who more than anyone else inspired me to write my own stories.

Billy Summers, the novel’s eponymous lead, is an Iraq war veteran and assassin hired for one final job. It’s a common premise, borderline cliche, and King makes no effort to hide it. But of course things aren’t that simple, and the beats the story follows are both unexpected and familiar. Unexpected because they diverge from the common tropes that would have made Billy Summers a more conventional and lesser book, and familiar because they very much play to two of King’s favourite themes: the bonds of community, and the power of the written word.

The first theme plays out as Summers ensconces himself in the neighbourhood where he establishes himself prior to that big final job, and again later, after the job is over, through a chance encounter with a young woman named Alice Maxwell. Alice is really the crux of the story, as she pulls the novel from its familiar rails and into far less trodden—and far more interesting—terrain. It’s a joy to read King as he establishes these relationships, as he is probably the best writer I know and making you feel like this is a reall community, and to care not just about the characters themselves, but about the relationships between them.

The second theme emerges as Billy’s cover story, which is that he is a writer cloistering himself away to finish the book. The details are fairly maddening to anyone trying to make it in the business these days, and suggest that King, though obviously intimately familiar with publishing, has perhaps a rosier than true picture of what being an emerging writer these days is like—Billy’s persona, an unknown and unpublished author, lands an agent after writing a couple of chapters of a novel, and the agent is then able not only to hook a major publisher for a potential seven-figure deal, but when he isn’t finishing the manuscript fast enough, gets a $50,000 advance without delivering anything (excuse me while I scream into a pillow). I get that this is a story concocted by characters who are not writers themselves, but it’s supposed to be plausible.

In any case, the heart of the theme comes when Billy starts writing, which provides catharsis for him while simultaneously informing us of his backstory. it’s a neat device, and King handles it well, switching effortlessly between voices. there is even a bit at the end that plays with the theme of writing as wish fulfillment, and King wisely concedes the limits of writing in shaping the world, even as he espouses its power (I was happy that Billy didn’t somehow become a best seller, whcih would have been cloying and ridiculous).

King’s prose is solid. He is not the world’s foremost stylist, but he has the self-assurance of an old pro and handles his words deftly, providing bits of linguistic filigree where the enhance without making everything too ornamental. As a writer, he’s story and character first (not sure which I’d grant primacy over which; perhaps it varies between books), prose second. And his dialogue rings true as ever. Reading him felt like visiting with an old friend. I suspect I’ll be picking up a lot more of his stuff, new and old, in the near future.

Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia - Joseph Pistone

The title tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Donnie Brasco is a firsthand account of Pistone’s six year-long stint undercover in the New York mob. Though first launched as a six-month project to take down a fencing operation, Pistone’s assignment changed unexpectedly when, in an effort to ingratiate himself enough to get evidence, he became a trusted figure with the Bonnano crime family. Ultimately he stayed undercover for six years, and by the time he was extracted he had nearly become a made man, a crownign achievement for an FBI officer.

One of the more surprising things to me aobut the book was learning that undercover work in the 70s was pretty much a new field, at least for the FBI. The organization had only started planting people a few years before, and much of the protocol was yet to be established. The upshot of this was that Pistone was constantly at risk, not just of discovery by the mob, but also of legal ramifications, since there were no clear lines as to what sort of behavioral was acceptable in order t oestablish his role.

Pistone tells the story in a plain, conversational way, making no effort to amp up the drama or embellish. The writing isn’t flashy, which works well. It almost seems like it could have been a recorded interview rather than a written book. Possibly it was. The story ends abruptyl, and though the last few pages provide some follow up, it doesn’t satisfy as a climax—however, since it’s a real story, I appreciate that it felt honest and unfabricated. There was no big reveal, no final tense conversation between him and Lefty. He was simply extracted one day, and that was the end of it.

Overall, it was an interesting story and an easy read. Not something to pursue for the language or style, but worth knowing.

Winter's Bone - Daniel Woodrell

The strength of Winter’s Bone lies in its simplicity. Ree Dolly is a girl from a community deep in the Ozarks where blood ties mean everything—or are supposed to—and the law isn’t trusted. She’s a mother to her two younger brothers, and to her own mother, who tumbled into madness some years before. Her father has vanished while out on bail, and the sheriff tells her that her house was posted as bond. If he doesn’t turn up, dead or alive, it goes to the county, and Ree and her family will be left homeless.

So begins an odyssey through the backwoods of Missouri, as Ree travels from house to house and town to town in search of answers. The Dolly bloodline flows into every corner of her world, but there are places where it runs too thin to protect her. The plot is spare, exposition flensed clean, resulting in an immediacy that further bolsters the comparisons with Cormac McCarthy, which were already inevitable from the subject matter and the writing style.

Woodrell’s prose is swift and lyrical, full of rich imagery that rises naturally from the words, rather than artful constructions of metaphor. At its best, it’s hallucinatory. though there were the odd passages that felt a bit overdone for me. One example: “a picnic of words fell from Gail’s mouth to be gathered around and savored slowly.” Such moments feel a bit self-consciously literary, but I’ll freely admit that my own writing could draw similar criticism, and probably does. Style is a matter of taste, and on the whole, Woodrell’s style is deft enough to earn its flourishes. It is not quite as transcendent as McCarthy’s but that’s a high bar to reach.