S Street Rising by Ruben Castaneda

S Street Rising by Ruben Castaneda

During the height of the crack epidemic that decimated the streets of D.C., Ruben Castaneda covered the crime beat for the Washington Post. The first in his family to graduate from college, he had landed a job at one of the country's premier newspapers. But his apparent success masked a devastating secret: he was a crack addict. Even as he covered the drug-fueled violence that was destroying the city, he was prowling S Street, a 24/7 open-air crack market, during his off hours, looking for his next fix.

S Street Rising is more than a memoir; it's a portrait of a city in crisis. It's the adrenalin-infused story of the street where Castaneda quickly became a regular, and where a fledgling church led by a charismatic and streetwise pastor was protected by the local drug kingpin, a dangerous man who followed an old-school code of honor. It's the story of Castaneda's friendship with an exceptional police homicide commander whose career was derailed when he ran afoul of Mayor Marion Barry and his political cronies. And it's a study of the city itself as it tried to rise above the bloody crack epidemic and the corrosive politics of the Barry era. S Street Rising is The Wire meets the Oscar-winning movie Crash. And it's all true.

Ruben Castaneda worked for twenty-two years as a staff writer at the Washington Post. His Washington Post Sunday magazine piece on struggling with addiction while covering the police beat won first place in feature writing from the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild Front Page Awards. He is the recipient of numerous other journalism awards. He lives in Washington, D.C.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781620400043
ISBN 10	1620400049
Title	S Street Rising
Author	Ruben Castaneda
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Year published	2014-09-11
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.