Vigorous on-the-ground reporting and a big-picture view combine to make this a jarring portrait of clear and present danger.
An eye-opening investigation of the relationship among gun violence and the drug and arms trades, all closely connected.
British journalist Grillo, who has worked the Latin America beat for more than two decades, begins with the trial of “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was extradited to New York to stand trial for running narcotics into the U.S.—$14 billion worth, by prosecutorial claim. Yet, as the author shows, Guzmán was more than a mere drug lord: “He would be seen as a war criminal if it were to be understood as a war.” The weapons that he bought and sold formed a large branch of the “iron river” that flows between the legal and illegal arms trades, a river defended by the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment fundamentalists everywhere even while enriching people like Guzmán. In this lively and incisive report, the author demonstrates that even as guns overrun the U.S., at least there are some checks on crime; most Latin American governments “cannot contain the gun-toting gangsters.” The author, a diligent and courageous investigator, traces the vehemence of some of these gun supporters to a larger anti-government ethos—e.g., biker gangs such as the Mongols are at war with both law enforcement and the Mexican Mafia. Drug runners are not always killers, Grillo notes; looking closely at Baltimore street gangs, he observes that “a small hardcore group is behind most of the bloodshed.” The real bad guys are political operatives and dealers, such as the Reagan administration officials who supplied the Salvadoran army with more than 260,000 hand grenades that now turn up in turf wars, 300 thrown in a single 2010 intergang battle in Mexico alone. Legalizing some drugs and tightening controls on gun sales, notes the author, will lessen the violence but won’t contain it all: “Claiming we can abolish the entire drug trade through enforcement is an unhelpful fantasy.”
Vigorous on-the-ground reporting and a big-picture view combine to make this a jarring portrait of clear and present danger.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-278-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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