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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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