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KILLING PABLO

THE HUNT FOR THE WORLD’S GREATEST OUTLAW

Essential reading for any aficionado of espionage scandals and Mafioso folklore.

In this riveting work of reportage, award-winning journalist Bowden (Black Hawk Down, 1999) details American involvement in the assassination of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian billionaire godfather of international cocaine trafficking.

Drawing on restricted documents, transcripts of Escobar’s bugged phone conversations, and interviews with soldiers and government officials involved in the mission, Bowden composes a fast-paced chronicle of the notorious Narco’s rise and downfall. He sketches out Escobar’s early days in 1960s Medellín, showing how the young crime boss launched a career of car-theft and extortion before making his millions in the cocaine business. Starting in 1984, Escobar and his guerillas—who hoped to coerce the Colombian government to ban extradition of drug traffickers to the US—began assassinating judges, police officers, journalists, and politicians. But what made him an American military target was his 1989 bombing of an Avianca airliner, a botched attempt to murder a Colombian presidential candidate that killed over 100 people, including two Americans. Escobar surrendered to the Colombian government under the condition that he could live in La Catedral, his luxury “prison,” where, protected by his henchmen, he entertained visitors with private bars, soccer games, and teenaged prostitutes. When the Colombian government attempted to relocate Escobar to a real penitentiary, he escaped by bribing Colombian officials and remained on the run for over a year. Bowden shocks with the horrific progression of Escobar’s Medellín cartel in the first part of this account, offers insightful perspectives of frustrated military men who hunt the drug lord in the second, and renders some nice portraits of interesting characters throughout. He does his best to get the facts straight by citing both Colombians’ and Americans’ recollections of significant events. Yet, with so much political corruption on both sides of the fence, he allows the reader to make the final judgments.

Essential reading for any aficionado of espionage scandals and Mafioso folklore.

Pub Date: May 8, 2001

ISBN: 0-87113-783-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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