An account that makes it difficult for American readers to ignore their country’s role in violence south of the border.
An MS-13 hit man–turned-informer provides extraordinary access to the co-authors before meeting his fate.
“This is a book about scraps,” write journalist Óscar Martínez (A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America, 2016, etc.) and his ethnographer brother, Juan José Martínez. By “scraps,” they don’t mean the colloquial fights, though their narrative is filled with those, many of them lethal. They mean discards, “leftovers that the enormous machinery of the United States chucks across its borders.” In a vicious cycle, the violence bred in Los Angeles, where gang warfare pits ethnicities against each other, returns home through deportation and spreads and increases through international networks to become a threat to governments in both countries. Though Miguel Ángel Tobar never left his native El Salvador or came close to the Hollywood that earned him his nickname, he was a murderer before his teens, ultimately responsible for so much of the bloodshed that would make his homeland “the most murderous country in the world.” Yet this story is as much about the international forces that shaped the killer who operated below the international radar as the violence spread by U.S. policies that support the repressive regimes in the countries where gang members can recruit acolytes to form larger and deadlier gangs. Caught in this cycle, Tobar turned informer for the police, testifying at trials behind a mask, his voice doctored, though his identity apparently wasn’t much in doubt. Between police corruption that spread to prisons that were controlled by the gangs and the brutal justice that gang loyalty demanded, the fate of the informer was never in doubt, either—it wasn’t a matter of if, but when. The immediate narrative both begins and ends with Tobar’s death, but in between, he shares his story of a life that offered few choices, none of them good.
An account that makes it difficult for American readers to ignore their country’s role in violence south of the border.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78663-493-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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