S Street Rising

May 5, 2014
A streetwise reporter takes a walk on Washington’s wild side in this gritty but unfocused memoir. Castaneda began his career as a Washington Post metro reporter at the height of the city’s crack cocaine and murder epidemics of the late 1980s and early 1990s, covering countless drug-related homicides and the city’s notorious mayor Marion Barry, who was arrested on narcotics charges while in office. Going a little too far with his research, Castaneda became a crack addict, binging away his money while fretting that dealers might recognize him at crime scenes and blackmail him. He paints an engrossing portrait of this woozy, lubricious demimonde and of the S Street ghetto where he scored, with vivid portraits of crack-addicted prostitutes he befriended, a pastor who was also protected by a drug kingpin, and of a charismatic police captain trying to reform the department and stem Washington’s chaos. Once Castaneda gets clean, the episodic narrative sputters unevenly; he recounts tense crime set pieces, including a bloody shooting spree at police headquarters, but also much feckless office politics as he tussles with editors over assignments and raises. At his best, Castaneda writes movingly of the unlikely wellsprings of solidarity and hope in communities that society has written off.

June 15, 2014
An illumination of the Washington, D.C., crack epidemic.As a reporter for the Washington Post, Castaneda undoubtedly learned that it can be trouble when a journalist gets too close to his story and even more trouble when the journalist becomes the story. Yet the author, drawing heavily on his experience and reportage in the crack and murder capital of the country, compounds those troubles by pacing his multiple narratives as if writing a novel (re-creating the thoughts of characters in situations he wasn't even around to witness) or TV series. The most dramatic narrative is the author's own story, that of someone who was already using crack when he was brought from Los Angeles to the Post to cover crime and quickly escalated into full-blown addiction as the drug became both his beat and his life. The paper sent him to rehab, and he dedicated himself to recovery (after one serious slip); that part of the narrative pretty much disappears halfway through the book. The second narrative concerns the rise and fall of the city's homicide chief, caught in the political machinations of Mayor Marion Berry's regime, who became not only a major source for the reporter, but also a closer friend than the subject of a journalist's coverage should be. Such a close relationship had consequences for both men. The third narrative concerns a minister who built a street church in the middle of a crack-dealing neighborhood and found the head dealer to be a guardian angel protecting the church-"a lovable teddy bear," or, as one neighbor put it, "the notorious, lovable godfather." Castaneda interweaves that narrative with the immediacy of the others, though he later explains that he experienced none of this firsthand but only learned of the preacher and the dealer after the fact.The subject matter is explosive and informed by good reporting, but the various narrative lines never really tie together, and the novelistic approach undermines the journalism.

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June 15, 2014

Former Washington Post reporter Castaneda takes on DC's (and his own) crack era in this memoir/social history. It's hard to find a better perspective: Castaneda writes as a recovering crack addict as well as the Post's crime reporter from 1989 until 1997, when DC was still known as the Murder Capital. (He covered local court issues, police brutality in particular, until 2011.) The author follows several stories: his own as he struggles to balance addiction, and eventually recovery, with his career; that of The New Community Church in the war-torn neighborhood where Castaneda once purchased drugs; and that of Lou Hennessy, onetime DC police commander of homicide. It's a story about healing and redemption as much as it is about the enormous toll this powerfully addictive drug took on the city, but none of these people or places emerge unscathed. VERDICT Castaneda puts his years of reportorial writing to quality use--this work is a page-turner. Recommended for readers especially interested in the war on drugs or DC and for fans of David Carr's The Night of the Gun or HBO's The Wire. [See the Q&A with Castaneda, p. 112.--Ed.]--Molly McArdle, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2014
When D.C. mayor Marion Barry was arrested for smoking crack, journalist Castaneda was in that hotel's lobby, phoning in the details to the Washington Post, where he'd recently landed a job, moving from L.A.'s now defunct Herald-Examiner. What Castaneda also brought to D.C. back then was his own crack addiction, and it is a nonchalantly and honestly detailed part of his memoir. While he's running down the stories and writing them well, he is also getting wasted. D.C.'s S Street is where the drug-selling action takes place, and Castaneda parallels his story with that of pastor Jim, who promises not to rat on the dealers but invites them to church, and that of honest, tough homicide cop Lou. There are scenes in this book that depict people acting in ways that are as low as one can humanly go, but they are related matter-of-factly, almost impersonally. There are also instances of incredible goodness, but the good guys don't always win. Castaneda's page-turner, told with easygoing charm and great skill, is an unstinting unveiling of who got away with what and when and how Castaneda followed the action and found himself.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)