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
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
SEEN & HEARD
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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