Engrossing and readable yet nightmarish vision of a hyperviolent and corporatized narcotics industry, seducing a new...
A grisly yet compelling tale of impoverished Mexican-American youth molded into assassins by Los Zetas, the fearsome drug cartel.
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Slater (Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating, 2013) adeptly develops a sprawling narrative regarding the “spillover” of cartel violence around 2005 into border cities like Laredo, Texas, where a long smuggling tradition was transformed by ruthless competition and NAFTA’s amplification of poverty: “All contras and defectors in Texas had to be eliminated, Zeta leadership decided. It could only be done with a strong presence on the U.S. side.” In a milieu of well-developed characters on both sides of the law, Slater focuses on two strong personalities: Mexican-born homicide detective Robert Garcia, and Gabriel Cardona, who’d plead guilty to several murders before age 20. Garcia twice arrested Cardona, yet the Zetas bonded him out to commit more shootings. Slater chillingly replicates Cardona’s perspective and experience, documenting the arc of his recruitment and training based on research and correspondence. While he follows this season of mayhem, as orchestrated by the Zetas hierarchy, he also looks at the political and historical narratives of the border, portraying a long-term corrupt, destructive relationship between the two nations regarding drugs, trade, and labor. “The U.S. government was eager to minimize the spillover narrative,” writes the author. Notwithstanding such priorities, Garcia’s team ultimately wiretapped and apprehended Cardona’s cell of youthful assassins in their Laredo safe house, securing long sentences for them. Still, this narrative triumph seems checked by a cynicism beyond the Zetas’ brutality. Even Garcia concludes that narcotics interdiction required “willful ignorance,” while his colleagues seemed addicted to the benefits of seized funds and career advancement. Slater covers this difficult social landscape with an empathetic eye and careful prose, vividly rendering a border region of “extreme poverty and garish wealth…elaborate courtesy and low-barbarian violence.”
Engrossing and readable yet nightmarish vision of a hyperviolent and corporatized narcotics industry, seducing a new generation with minimal alternatives.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2654-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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