Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed. By David Farber,. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. x + 214 pp. Photographs, illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $24.95. ISBN: 978-1-108-42527-8 .; Coca Yes, Cocaine No: How Bolivia's Coca Growers Reshaped Democracy. By Thomas Grisaffi,. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. ix + 261 pp. Photographs, maps, references, notes, index. Cloth, $99.95; paper $26.95. ISBN: cloth, 978-1-4780-0171-3 ; paper, 978-1-4780-0297-0 .

Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed. By David Farber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. x + 214 pp. Photographs, illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $24.95. ISBN: 978-1-108-42527-8.

Coca Yes, Cocaine No: How Bolivia's Coca Growers Reshaped Democracy. By Thomas Grisaffi. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. ix + 261 pp. Photographs, maps, references, notes, index. Cloth, $99.95; paper $26.95. ISBN: cloth, 978-1-4780-0171-3 ; paper, 978-1-4780-0297-0.

Both of these books are written by authors who seek to denounce injustice. The two authors, David Farber and Thomas Grisaffi, address the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people connected in various ways to the illegal cocaine trade. Attempting to be fair, both authors face the challenges posed by the actions of many players in this industry; most actors are responsible both for their own fate and victims at the same time. Fairness is even harder to achieve as information about the industry is scarce and not necessarily reliable. For attempting to inform us about these tragic but important events in a balanced way, both authors are worthy of our appreciation and both have produced books of interest to business historians.

Farber is Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor in the history department of the University of Kansas. An accomplished scholar whose writing commands the reader with simple, direct, and (appropriately for this book) streetwise prose, he has given us a great new book. In Crack, he depicts the American tragedy of crack cocaine: addiction for some, incarceration for others—with most being African Americans. The book is organized chronologically. The first three chapters review the history of the cocaine market and its politics to the 1970s and examine the emergence of crack producers, dealers, and consumers. The next three discuss social reactions in the form of hip-hop culture and policy. Finally, a slow partial recovery is described.

In Farber's account, U.S. president Ronald Reagan set the context for the rise of crack. Reagan's mid-1980s economic policies led to deindustrialization and high African American unemployment. Crack—a frequent-dose, low-price addictive drug, a “quick nickel” rather than “slow dime”—came in and became widely available at the same time, facilitating mass consumption but also reducing entry barriers to selling crack because little upfront capital was required and revenue flowed smoothly. Supply...