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BLOOD IN THE FIELDS

Name: BLOOD IN THE FIELDS
Author: Julia Reynolds
ISBN: 978-1-61374-969-2

TEN YEARS INSIDE CALIFORNIA'S NUESTRA FAMILIA GANG

by Julia Reynolds ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2014

A sprawling, literary true-crime effort that will reward patient readers with its gloomy account of an unstoppable, violent...

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Brisk, detailed exposé of the little-understood gang Nuestra Familia.

Monterey County Herald staff writer Reynolds, a recipient of Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship, spent 12 years covering the gang (including as co-producer and writer of a PBS documentary), and it shows in her intense, intimate approach: She begins abruptly, without much context regarding the unique nature of Latino gangs. This one began in Northern California prisons in the 1960s as a rival to the powerful Mexican Mafia and has since gained territory via a street-level offshoot, the Norteños. Reynolds builds a long-term narrative focused on a volatile NF clique in Salinas, receiving orders from gang superiors allegedly isolated in the Pelican Bay Supermax prison. She personalizes this approach by utilizing the perspectives of a Mexican-American cop and several beleaguered gangsters, who became informants, accepted plea deals for violent felonies or were themselves victims of violence. Looking beneath their pseudo-revolutionary “Cause” (“a shallow and manipulative ideology”), she portrays a criminal conspiracy fusing cold business acumen, a corporate-style structure and vicious hatred for “Sureños” (Southern California Latinos). By the late 1990s, “the NF had blanketed the state and was now running regiments in every tiny [agricultural] town.” However, the gang’s fortunes turned when then–U.S. Attorney Robert Mueller decided to pursue NF federally. Soon, even the crew’s higher-ups were cutting deals with the FBI, leading to one imprisoned teenage killer’s bitter conclusion: “The Cause…was nothing but generations of lies told to entice kids like him to do a few old guys’ dirty work.” Yet, after spawning a complex investigation, the feds desisted after 9/11, leading the local cops to decide that “the Mexican-American lives lost on California’s back-country roads were of little concern in Washington.” Reynolds concludes that the high-profile prosecutions actually advanced their power: “With each new guilty verdict the gang branched out” within the federal prison system.

A sprawling, literary true-crime effort that will reward patient readers with its gloomy account of an unstoppable, violent subculture.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-61374-969-2

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.