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

by David Simon

The sad and beautiful truth about Gary McCullough—a man born and raised in as brutal and unforgiving a ghetto as America ever managed to create—is that he can’t bring himself to hurt anyone.

The corner is rooted in human desire—crude and certain and immediate. And the hard truth is that all the law enforcement in the world can’t mess with desire.

We want it to be about nothing more complicated than cash money and human greed, when at bottom, it’s about a reason to believe. We want to think that it’s chemical, that it’s all about the addictive mind, when instead it has become about validation, about lost souls assuring themselves that a daily relevance can be found at the fine point of a disposable syringe.