Survival in East Baltimore at the Height of the Crack Epidemic

D. Watkins thought his Georgetown University acceptance letter was going to be his ticket out of East Baltimore. But just days after he received the news, his brother Devin was shot, and D. ended up taking over the family crack empire, becoming even more entangled in the drugs, crime, and violence he was trying to escape. In his New York Times bestselling book, The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir, Watkins, a writer and professor at the University of Baltimore, describes what happened, and how he survived.