Glenny does an admirable investigative job, delving deeply into the complicated causes and effects of Rio’s drug trafficking.
A page-turning chronicle of the life and career of a favela don illustrates the larger challenges of a deeply impoverished, class-ridden Brazilian society.
British author and former BBC Central Europe correspondent Glenny (DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You, 2011, etc.) finds an inspiring subject in Antonio Francisco Bonfim Lopes, aka Nem, one of the most wanted drug running criminals in Rio de Janeiro, who has been imprisoned since 2011 in the high-security Campo Grande prison in Mato Grosso do Sul. Having interviewed him in prison multiple times over two years, the author vividly depicts the extraordinary career of this young don of the Rocinha favela—the largest of Rio’s hundreds of slum neighborhoods—with enormous subtlety and sympathy, filling in his story by interviewing his family, enemies, colleagues, and others. Rocinha—the size of a small city in which tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of residents live “cheek by jowl” with more middle-class districts of Ipanema, Leblon, and others—was adversely affected by the rise of the cocaine trafficking market in the 1980s, with drug lords taking turns running the favela economy, employing the gangsters, eliminating enemies, and generally keeping the peace with the Red Command. Having grown up in the favela, Nem was in his early 20s in 2000, a driver by trade and with a wife and sick daughter, when he solicited help from the current don, Lulu, borrowing money for his daughter’s care and thus indenturing himself with the Mafia. From working for Lulu’s “security” to gradually taking on more responsibility, Nem rose above the internecine gangster wars in 2004 and 2005 to take command in Rocinha at the time of Brazil’s enormous economic surge and globalization. For five years, Nem ran the local welfare economy in relative harmony, until the military and civil police began a “pacification” program to rid the city of the drug trade—and clean it up for the World Cup and the Olympics.
Glenny does an admirable investigative job, delving deeply into the complicated causes and effects of Rio’s drug trafficking.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35103-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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