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This topic has been archived - replies are not allowed.
so as the final season comes to an end, I dont know what im gonna do without the wire  ...so i was wondering if anyone knew of any books like The Wire that could maybe tide me over with no wire???
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(16 of 16)
Mar 4, 2008 5:17 PM
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Walter Mosley and Easy Rawlins belong at this table
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2,832
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(15 of 16)
Mar 4, 2008 12:05 PM
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> "B-more Careful" by Shannon Holmes
>
> --
> Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis
C/S
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sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!
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(14 of 16)
Mar 4, 2008 11:51 AM
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No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark-is a non-fiction book, recently reissued, covers some Wire territory, Black v Police, in 'revolutionary' (riot) days. After writing the book, the author, Ron Porambo, was shot in the head, turned to crime, and died in prison.
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Edited by motep at 03/04/2008 8:56 AM
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(13 of 16)
Mar 4, 2008 2:01 AM
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a new one by one of the Wire's writing staff:
Books of The Times
A Kaleidoscopic Perspective on a Murder, and Dreams Lost and Found
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Published: March 4, 2008
No one writes better dialogue than Richard Price ? not Elmore Leonard, not David Mamet, not even David Chase. Not only does Mr. Price have perfect pitch for the lingo, the rhythms and the inflections of how people talk, but he also knows how to use a line or two or even a single phrase to conjure a character?s history and emotional vibe. He?s as adept as Tom Wolfe at using his journalistic eye for social detail ? for how people juggle work and love and money, and navigate the confounding maze of class and social status in big cities today ? but he does so without turning his characters, as Mr. Wolfe so often does, into caricatures or cartoons.
LUSH LIFE
By Richard Price
455 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
In his latest novel, ?Lush Life,? Mr. Price puts his myriad gifts together to create his most powerful and galvanic work yet, a novel that showcases his sympathy and his street cred and all his skills as a novelist and screenwriter: his gritty-lyrical prose, his cinematic sense of pacing, his uncanny knowledge of the nooks and crannies of his characters? hearts. ?Lush Life? is a novel that gives us a wide, 3-D Imax portrait of a small corner of New York City (the Lower East Side of a few years ago, at that hinge point in time, when young hipsters were beginning to push out the immigrants and the working poor), a novel that captures Manhattan?s magnetic appeal to dreamers and drifters, and its ability to crush the weak and unlucky and turn their dreams into disappointment and rage.
At its most basic level, ?Lush Life? is a police procedural, and it possesses all the gut-level suspense of a detective story. But like ?The Wire,? the highly acclaimed HBO series about cops and drug dealers (which Mr. Price has written for), it transcends the episodic formula of shows like ?CSI? and ?Law & Order,? which have conventional beginnings, middles and ends. While ?Lush Life? does indeed begin with a murder and ends, more or less, with the arrest and confession of the gunman, its narrative bleeds out way beyond the boundaries of this crime, showing the consequences that this killing has on the lives of everyone involved, from the victim?s family to the investigating cops, from assorted witnesses and suspects to the actual perp himself. It is a novel that unfolds slowly to show the collision of cultures ? between cops and civilians, aspiring artists, blue-collar wage slaves and homeboys from the housing projects ? that exists in this ?Candyland of a neighborhood,? even as it delineates the ambitions and resentments and familial calamities shared by characters whose lives converge through the most random of events.
What happens late one night (well, early one morning) is this: Eric Cash, a restaurant manager and wannabe writer, and his new bartender, Ike Marcus, another ?La Bohèmer? who looks like a ?poster boy for the neighborhood,? are walking Ike?s very drunken friend, Steven Boulware, home from a night of barhopping, when suddenly a shot is fired, and Ike lies dead in the street. Eric tells the investigating cop, Matty Clark, that two black or Hispanic guys came up to them, demanded they ?give it up,? and that when Ike refused (?You picked the wrong guy?), one of the muggers shot him and took off.
There are holes in Eric?s story, however ? he didn?t call 911 on his cellphone, as he claimed, for instance ? and two ?eyewits? say they never saw any muggers. What?s more, Eric seems to have had an irrational grudge against Ike since the moment they met. With his casual confidence and dreams of artistic success, the young bartender makes the 35-year-old Eric overly conscious of how his own life has stalled, how he is still working at a restaurant after so many years with nothing to show for it all but an unfinished screenplay. Ike reminds Eric of who he used to be, and he also reminds him of how far he?s fallen from the ladder of his dreams.
By cutting back and forth between Eric?s point of view and the points of view of Matty, his partner, Ike?s father, and that of Tristan, a teenager from the projects, Mr. Price gives us a kaleidoscopic perspective on Ike?s murder, on the corner of the Lower East Side they all inhabit, and on the larger world of New York that bears down upon them all with unrelenting pressure. He shows us Matty dealing with the frustrations of police bureaucracy and problems at home with his wayward sons, as he tries to find Ike?s killer and calm down Ike?s increasingly hysterical father. He shows us Tristan, a wannabe gangster and rap poet who?s stuck in an abusive home, minding his little siblings (the ?hamsters,? as he calls them), when he wants to be out on the streets, flashing his new .22 and playing the role of a proud ?do-anything soldier.? And he shows us Eric, pushed by Ike?s murder into even further depths of narcissistic self-pity, a self-dramatizing artiste, whose thwarted ambitions have metastasized into an ugly blend of pretension and self-loathing.
The hard, daily slog of police work, made up not of highlight-reel discoveries and arrests, but of the grinding, old-school, shoe-leather following of leads; the glitter, aspirational energy and spiritual emptiness of the ?Bohèmers? ? world of swank bars and trendy restaurants; the narrow, unforgiving routine of life in the projects, where drug dealing seems like one of the few ways out of a future of small-time ?mouse plays? ? all these disparate worlds are captured by Mr. Price here with a pitch-perfect blend of swagger and compassion.
He knows how these tectonic plates slide and crash up against one another, and he also knows how the six degrees of separation between his characters can instantly collapse into one, when a random act of violence or kindness brings players from these worlds together. He depicts his characters? daily lives with such energy, such nuance and such keen psychological radar that he makes it all come alive to the reader ? a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City and some of its residents, complete with soundtrack, immortalized in this dazzling prose movie of a novel.
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Mar 4, 2008 1:47 AM
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This Times article today made me think, whoa, it's even more like the Wire than I thought. It's written by a Snott Templeton!
Author Admits Acclaimed Memoir Is Fantasy
In ?Love and Consequences,? a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.
'Love and Consequences,' by Margaret B. Jones: However Mean the Streets, Have an Exit Strategy (February 26, 2008)
A Refugee From Gangland (February 28, 2008)
These articles were published before the author admitted the book was largely fabricated.
The problem is that none of it is true.
Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.
Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published ?Love and Consequences,? is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer?s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.
In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Ms. Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.
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(11 of 16)
Mar 1, 2008 12:43 PM
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I might buy this one...
Books of The Times
However Mean the Streets, Have an Exit Strategy
Article Tools Sponsored By
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: February 26, 2008
In the South-Central neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Margaret B. Jones grew up in the 1980s, gangs recruited ?with the same intensity as the N.F.L. did,? she says, and shootouts and hits were so ubiquitous that ?the odds were stacked against a male child living to see 25.? Peddlers went door to door selling life insurance policies, reminding parents of these deadly stats, and even teenage girls and elderly church ladies carried pistols to protect themselves. As the crack epidemic metastasized, and turf wars escalated, the ?hood became a combat zone, with police raids and deadly face-offs between Bloods and Crips becoming routine parts of daily life.
Margaret B. Jones
LOVE AND CONSEQUENCES
A Memoir of Hope and Survival
By Margaret B. Jones
A dealer the young Ms. Jones made deliveries for lays out the unforgiving rules of the street:
¶ ?Trust no one. Even your own momma will sell you out for the right price or if she gets scared enough.?
¶ ?War has no room for diplomacy, war is outright vicious. Never expect mercy and never show it.?
¶ ?There is no greater sin in war than ignorance. Never speak or act on anything you aren?t 100 percent sure of, or someone will expose your mistake and take you down for it.?
This violent world has been memorably depicted before in Sanyika Shakur?s ?Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member? (1993) and Leon Bing?s ?Do or Die? (1991). What sets Ms. Jones?s humane and deeply affecting memoir apart is not just that it?s told from the point of view of a young girl coming of age in this world, but also that it focuses on the bonds of love and loyalty that can bind relatives and gang members together, and the craving after safety and escape that haunts so many lives in the ?hood.
Although some of the scenes she has recreated from her youth (which are told in colorful, streetwise argot) can feel self-consciously novelistic at times, Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood. She captures both the brutal realities of a place where children learn to sleep on the floor to avoid the random bullets that might come smashing through the windows and walls at night, and the succor offered by family and friends. She conveys the extraordinary stoicism of women like Big Mom, her foster mother, who raised four grandchildren while working a day job and a night job. And she draws indelible portraits of these four kids who became her siblings: two young girls she would help raise, and two older boys, whom she emulated and followed into the Bloods.
Ms. Jones ? or Bree, as she was known to family and friends ? was abused as a child, put in foster care, and after three years of carrying a trash bag filled with her possessions from one temporary home to another, ended up, at 8 ½, in Big Mom?s home in South-Central ? a part white, part Native American girl who looked utterly out of place in this nearly all-black world.
Bree had been told she had attention deficit disorder, reactive attachment disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and labeled ?S.E.D. (severely emotionally disabled).? By age 8 she had ?decided not to hurt anymore? and mastered the art of detachment: ?I was shocked that I hadn?t thought of it before. I would watch my life from the outside rather than feel it from within. If I couldn?t feel it, it couldn?t hurt me.?
Though her foster family?s love would help heal Bree?s heart, the numbness always threatened to return, and she observes that this sort of emotional hibernation was rampant in South-Central. When Bree went to visit her foster brother Taye in prison ? he?d been sentenced for selling drugs ? he told her he loved her but didn?t want her to come back for any more visits: waiting for visits and letters, he said, ?was killin me,? and he?d decided he wasn?t going to ?even find out what was up wit y?all.? He had to do his ?time solo? or he ?ain gonna make it.?
Ms. Jones?s portraits of her family and friends are so sympathetic and unsentimental, so raw and tender and tough-minded that it?s clear to the reader that whatever detachment she learned as a child did not impair her capacity for caring. Instead it heightened her powers of observation, enabling her to write with a novelist?s eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist?s eye for social rituals and routines.
She tells us how her brother Terrell became an ?official? Blood, getting ?jumped into? the gang by surviving a savage initiation beating. (?So five grown men beat 13-year-old Terrell for two minutes in the street.?) She tells us about getting a .38 for her 13th birthday and learning how to cook up a batch of crack to pay her family?s overdue water bill. She tells us about survival tips for visiting the local park. (?You must always scan the park, figure out who is where and the best escape route from each direction.?) And she tells us about the iconography of the tattooed tear many prisoners and ex-prisoners wear on one cheek. (It ?can mean a few things, but usually it?s that the wearer killed someone in prison or lost a loved one while in prison.?)
Ms. Jones?s own story is strewn with loss and death and grief. She saw a gang elder named Kraziak, who?d patiently taught her about the history of L.A., gunned down by rival Crips. She saw her next-door neighbor Big Rodney, who used to give her books to read, grabbed by the police in a violent raid.
Both her older brothers, Terrell and Taye, were sent to prison, and after his release, Terrell, who?d talked of getting a straight job so his children wouldn?t grow up in the ?hood, was shot to death by Crips as he sat outside Big Mom?s house, waiting to meet his son for his weekend visit. Ms. Jones?s friend Marcus, a brother figure with whom she used to drive around Los Angeles, dreaming of what life might be like ?beyond the lights? of the city, was shot and killed, she says, and her boyfriend, Slikk, was arrested for an attempted murder he didn?t commit.
Although one of Bree?s teachers urges her to apply to college, the idea initially seems ?almost unimaginable? ? ?so beyond my reach that I couldn?t really picture myself doing it.? Finally, however, she does apply and eventually graduates from the University of Oregon with a degree in ethnic studies. She finds love with, of all men, a Crip who ?changed every detail of my life? and who taught her that ?we are not each other?s enemies,? we ?were just born into different streets and neighborhoods.?
?Unlike most of my homies,? she writes, ?I made it out of L.A. with my life and without a prison record. Wait, let me reword that, as it is not entirely true as it stands. I made it out of L.A. with what life I had left. I wake up in the morning, and where I live, in a little house on a dead-end street in a small Oregon town, I hear birds singing in a big-leaf maple outside my bedroom window, and I thank God because I know it shouldn?t have been so.?
There are ?some parts of me that did die in L.A.,? she adds, ?and that I?ll never get back, and other parts of me that die daily because I exist away from the city, in a world where people can?t begin to imagine what it was like where I grew up.?
One of her friends in prison writes her that ?so few of us will ever get the chance to see what it?s like outside L.A.,? that she should ?be our eyes.? That Ms. Jones has done, and with this remarkable book she has also borne witness to the life in the ?hood that she escaped, conveying not just the terrible violence and hatred of that world, but also the love and friendship that sustained her on those mean streets.
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733
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(10 of 16)
Feb 29, 2008 2:15 PM
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Check out "Grace After Midnight" Snoop's memoirs asap......it's like The Wire
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"I'm a Ruler of my Temple"
Wallace: "So How do you get to be the King?"
Dee:"It aint like that yo"....."See... The King, Stay the King"......"Everything stay Who he is....."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bR3T1eThJU
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79
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1/8/08
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(9 of 16)
Feb 27, 2008 9:26 PM
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> also, many of the show's writers are novelists. you
> might like their novels as well. richard price,
> george pelecanos, etc.
I havent read anything by Richard Price or Dennis Lehane, but after seeing George Pelecanos' name as a writing credit on the Wire i read a book of his about a record shop, cant remember the name of it, and to be honest, it stunk. Maybe i was comparing it to the Wire ( most things stink compared to the Wire) but it was very disappointing.
Try Carl Hiassen,a very funny crime writer, no doubt.
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79
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(8 of 16)
Feb 27, 2008 9:14 PM
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Try The Long Firm Trilogy (The Long Firm, He Kills Coppers and TrueCrime) by Jake Arnott.
Anyone looking for US ghetto themed writing will be disappointed, but in terms of the quality of writing, strength of characterisation and similarities of narrative, i would recommend them.
Oh yeah, one of the main characters is a gay gangster too!
I think much of the Wires writing has been influenced by Tom Wolfe so check him out if you havent already, although after A Man In Full he gets a bit wobbly imo.
Back when I think of some more.
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2/26/08
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(7 of 16)
Feb 27, 2008 8:12 PM
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Alright thanks everyone!
ill be sure to check those out.
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485
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(6 of 16)
Feb 27, 2008 2:28 PM
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"B-more Careful" by Shannon Holmes
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Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis
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Posts:
14
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1/4/08
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(5 of 16)
Feb 27, 2008 2:02 PM
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read david simon's books.
for the pohlice: homicide: a year on the killing streets
for the street: the corner: a year in the life of an inner-city neighborhood
i can't recommend these enough. they are both amazing books.
also, many of the show's writers are novelists. you might like their novels as well. richard price, george pelecanos, etc.
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2/26/08
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(4 of 16)
Feb 26, 2008 10:10 PM
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there is a book about The Wire. It's very good. Enjoyable read and tells you about the true people the characters are based on
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916
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(3 of 16)
Feb 26, 2008 9:49 PM
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If you want to read about the struggle try J California Cooper..her books mess you up but have you mentally empowered for change in the end..Damn Great Story teller that Lady is..Damn Good.
If you want to read about drugs sex n money try the neighborhood book dude..everyone is an "Authorist" now LOL. But the original was Sister Souljah's Coldest Winter Ever.
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They Moving the Hood Out!
-GOD is in the Detail's-
There's a B in Subtle!
Loyalty Before Dishonor
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207
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(2 of 16)
Feb 26, 2008 9:42 PM
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Read the true story about Milton" butch" Jones and the Y.B.I. they were from Detriot Mi, Nino Brown from New Jack City was based on him. My aunt married his cousin.
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Bless you all and bring our troops home now.
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