A startling account of a desperate problem boiling on and spilling over the border.
Mexico City–based investigative journalist Beith presents the bloody story of Mexico’s drug-trafficking kingpin.
In 2009, Joaquin Guzman appeared on the Forbes magazine billionaire list. Better known as “El Chapo,” Guzman, since his sensational 2001 escape from a maximum-security prison, happened also to be Mexico’s most-wanted man. Chapo hasn’t been seen in public for more than two years. Sequestered in the hills of Durango or his native Sinaloa, he’s virtually the last man standing in the savage drug wars that have crippled Mexico. Beith traces the country’s serious drug trade back to the ’70s, when the Colombian Medellín and Cali cartels ruled, and Mexican capo El Padrino served as point man. In charge of logistics for El Padrino and fueled by his ambition, efficiency and ruthlessness, Chapo steadily rose through the ranks. By the ’90s, with El Padrino in prison and the Colombians muscled out of the way, Mexican drug lords were growing their own product and fighting each other for control of the $40-billion-per-year industry. In a desperately poor country, many people see drug traffickers as Robin Hoods, but they also bring kidnappings, assassinations, beheadings and torture. Chapo’s emergence from this sanguinary scrum is the heart of the author’s tale, but he forthrightly concedes the difficulty of reporting on the elusive boss and organized crime in general, dealing as he must with so many untrustworthy sources. He offers a discouraging list of the dead journalists who’ve gotten too close to the story. Thus, only a faint picture of Chapo emerges: his four wives and many mistresses, the relatives and allies he’s lost to prison or murder, anecdotal evidence of his ability to charm, seduce and strategize. His near-mythic status has been enhanced by a variety of factors, including his influence (at one time he employed as many as 150,000 people) his many escapes from near-capture, the narcocorridos (drug ballads) and public banners mocking thwarted rivals and feckless law enforcement (“You’ll never get Chapo”). More successfully, Beith paints a depressing picture of the culture of corruption ensnaring Mexico’s government officials, military and police. The trade also thrives because of the flow of illegal weapons south and because of America’s apparently insatiable demand for heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines. Today, the Sinaloa cartel has cells in more than half of American states.
A startling account of a desperate problem boiling on and spilling over the border.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1952-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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