The Corner is a very hard and depressing read, but also a very worthwhile book. The basic gist is that David Simon and Ed Burns followed people at a Baltimore drug corner for a year, writing about their lives honestly (sometimes brutally so), documenting what the human side of the war on drugs is.

The book follows a variety of people in different roles. Some are dealers, some are junkies, some are merely trying to live their lives in a neighbourhood that used to be full of working black families, but now is just full of abandoned and trashed rowhouses, drug-related violence and crime. The book doesn't try to sugarcoat things, so not all of the people in the book always come off tremendously well, but that's purely a plus. These are real people, after all, and real people aren't perfect. The goal was to open people's eyes and make them see the ongoing drug epidemic not as abstract numbers and catchphrases, but as a huge factor in countless human beings' lives.

Although the book was written in the mid-to-late 90s, these past 25 years haven't made the problems any smaller, and so the book is still extremely current and relevant. It is, in my opinion, critically important to understand the circumstances that push people to the corner, because the only way we can hope to turn things around is by tackling the root causes, instead of just throwing more and more people into prisons.

Very much recommended.