WHEN CRACK WAS KING: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era, by Donovan X. RamseyCrack erupted across America’s marginalized urban neighborhoods in the 1980s like a biblical plague torn from the pages of Revelation. It was the perfect “superdrug,” and Black communities, redlined in concrete city blocks, were neglected as their wealthier white neighbors escaped crack’s worst embrace. Donovan X. Ramsey came of age in a crack-era neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, where it was better not to ask questions. “It was like growing up in a steel town where nobody talked about steel,” he writes in “When Crack Was King,” his panoramic social history of the rise and fall of the epidemic. His book offers a needed corrective to the period’s biased media coverage and tropes — “crackhead,” “crack baby,” “superpredator” — the impetus behind some of the country’s most draconian drug legislation.

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Persons: Donovan X, Ramsey, Richard Nixon’s, H.R, Haldeman, Nixon “, ” Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Len Bias, Reagan Organizations: Nixon’s, Blacks Locations: Black, Columbus , Ohio