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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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