A drug trafficker recounts his life on the lam in this debut memoir.
Growing up in a small South Dakota town where boys “aspired to be Daniel Boone, not Kanye West,” Davis’ life dramatically changed when he left home in 1974 for the bright lights of Las Vegas. As a college student, he started manufacturing “White Crosses” (speed pills) and soon recruited the local Bandidos motorcycle gang to distribute his supply. His decision to enter this volatile, dangerous world ushered in a period of extreme wealth, as he earned close to $200,000 per week selling the drug. But then he was caught by authorities and incarcerated—ironically enough, for selling marijuana, a far less expensive and less lethal substance than speed. He avoided this conviction, however, by jumping bail and slipping over the border into Mexico undetected. During his many years on the run across Central and South America, he found some unusual ways to hide out: with the infamous Colombian Medellín drug cartel, in Panama’s mostly uncharted Darien Gap, and even, briefly, in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Desperate to stay one step ahead of the American authorities (federales), Davis falsified his identity and moved often from city to city to avoid arousing suspicion: “I was a fugitive with a stolen fake passport….I was trying to con a con,” he writes. This memoir is written with an intense, electrifying energy; for example, when Davis is finally caught by authorities in Venezuela, he says, “I had sworn early on that the only way I would return to America was with pennies on my eyes or in handcuffs.” Co-author Conti (Whatever Happened to Martin Barnett?, 2016, etc.) helps to hold things together in a strong retelling that addresses the many complexities of Davis’ life story. The narrative is propelled by sharp, energizing prose that firmly holds readers’ attention as they’re plunged into the dramatic, unstable Central American drug circuit. For those who are uninitiated into this elusive milieu, the book offers robust context that combines with the larger narrative and truly enriches the story of a life lived on the edge. A fast-paced, thrilling work about navigating the dangerous drug trade.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-938812-84-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Full Court Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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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