Posts Tagged ‘The Wire’

Library Additions: Half Price Books Etc. Finds

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021

All of these are Half Price Books finds (mostly in Houston) unless otherwise noted, including a fair amount of signed work and non-fiction.

  • Adams, Douglas. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Simon & Schuster, 1987. First edition hardback (simultaneous with the UK Heinemann edition), a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Bought for $9.99.
  • Barksdale, Dante, with Grace Kearney. Growing Up Barksdale: A True Baltimore Story. No publisher listed, printed 2020. Trade paperback POD reprint, a Fine copy. Autobiography by a former Baltimore gang member who’s family’s story provided some of the grist for David Simon’s The Wire. A Christmas gift from Dwight.
  • (Ellison, Harlan) Ellen Weil and Gary K. Wolfe. Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. Ohio State University Press, 2002. First edition trade paperback original, a Fine- copy with bottom outer edges slightly bumped. Bought for $12.49.
  • Gaiman, Neil. The View from the Cheap Seats. William Morrow, 2016. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, signed by Gaiman. Collection of non-fiction (essays, interview, etc.).
  • King, Stephen. Lisey’s Story. Scribner, 2006. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Bought at Goodwill for $3.99. I generally don’t pick up King’s new trade editions because I know they will show up used cheap. And I generally can’t afford the signed limited editions unless they’re coming out from a publisher I’m already a regular customer of and can pick them up at a (usually slight) discount pre-publication. But $3.99 for a perfect copy falls into “good enough” territory.
  • McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. Knopf, 1992. First edition hardback, an Ex-Library copy with all the usual flaws, otherwise Very Good. A true first of his first Pulitzer winner and first book of the Border trilogy. Bought for $6.99.
  • Stephenson, Neal. Seveneves. HarperCollins, 2015. First edition hardback, special signed edition with gold “Signed First Edition” sticker on the cover and “THIS SIGNED EDITION OF/seveneves/by/Neal Stephenson/[signature]/HAS BEEN SPECIALLY BOUND/BY THE PUBLISHER” signature page bound in before the half-title page, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Bought for $9.99.
  • Sterling, Bruce. Schismatrix Plus. Ace, 1996. First edition trade paperback original, Near Fine- with slight spine crease, slight sun fading to spine, and edgewear, signed by Sterling. Contains the novel plus the Shaper/Mechanist stories from Crystal Express. I never bothered to pick this up when it came out because I already had first editions of both, but picking up variant titles is classic late-phase book collecting behavior. Bought for $7.49.
  • (Tolkien, J. R. R.) Day, David. An Encyclopedia of Tolkien: The History and Mythology That inspired Tolkien’s World. Canterbury Classics, 2019. First edition hardback, a Fine copy bound in embossed leather, sans dust jacket, as issued. Tolkien reference work by an author who has done a lot of other Tolkien reference works. A very attractive book, with gilded edges and full-color illustrated endpapers, from a publisher that mostly seems to do leatherbound prestige reprints. Bought for $12.49.

  • The Wire as Documentary

    Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

    It’s always dangerous to assume that any fictional work accurately reflects reality, be it movie, TV show, or novel. But some works come a lot closer than others.

    HBO’s The Wire rings truer to me than most, not primarily because of the gritty, noir depiction of urban crime and a dysfunctional, overworked police department, but because they accord very closely with creator David Simon’s excellent non-fiction work from which they draw, Homicide: A Year in the Killing Streets (also the basis of the NBC TV show) and (with Edward Burns) The Corner.

    Well, here’s Simon delivering a righteous smackdown to Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III over his assertion that the show was a “smear that will take decades to overcome”:

    Others might reasonably argue, however, that it is not 60 hours of “The Wire” that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility. That is the police department we depicted in “The Wire,” give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last 20 years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O’Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work.

    And here’s a former Baltimore police officer backing him up on it: “As a former Baltimore police officer for 11 years, I can attest to the fact that much of what appears in the HBO series “The Wire” is a very accurate depiction of reality both on the street and within the Baltimore Police Department.”

    As for the greater issue of why Baltimore crime remains stubbornly high, why the drug problem remains so intractable (I’m in the “legalize it, regulate it, and tax it” camp), and why the “broken window” policing Mayor Rudy Guiliani used to bring down New York’s historically high crime rates has not (could not? can’t?) be used in Baltimore is a topic far beyond the scope of this blog (and my own expertise, formidable as it may (or may not) be).

    The Wire Edition of Monopoly

    Friday, October 15th, 2010

    I can’t believe I linked this before Dwight. Sadly, it appears to be a parody.

    Then again, I suspect that a board-game version of The Wire might sell really well. Hell, for all I know, it already exists…

    Toy Wire

    Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

    A mashup of Toy Story and The Wire (complete with Wire language).

    Hat tip: Mike Godwin’s Facebook feed.