The Baltimore-born writer and Salon columnist D. Watkins has assembled a new collection of essays called The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir (Grand Central Publishing). It's a raw, riveting memoir of his time as a drug dealer, and how the love of a woman and the love of reading enabled him to leave the life of the street, and become one of the country’s most trenchant and compelling African American writers. D. Watkins joins Tom in the studio to talk about the criminal life he left behind, and how he found a path out of the darkness.