An unusual, self-aggrandizing, ground-level look at the dangerous milieu of Mexican cartels.
Account of a reformed gangster’s employment with the Arrelano-Felix Brothers drug cartel.
A foreword by California Justice Department Special Agent Steve Duncan sets up Corona’s unusual confessional. He explains, “Corona [was] a member of the ‘Death Squad,’ a special group of cartel enforcers with tactical ability.” In the aftermath of the brothers’ notorious 1993 airport murder of a Mexican cardinal, American law enforcement successfully indicted Corona’s generation of cartel killers. Corona made a deal with prosecutors; Duncan notes, he “testified to each murder in Federal Grand Jury often times crying as he recounted the details to jurors.” This book supposedly stems from the same redemptive impulse. Corona writes of his California childhood, where, despite a strict but stable upbringing in a military family, he was attracted to gang life from an early age, dealing drugs on the beach at age 13: “Even though I was technically a Posole home boy, I made it a point not to dress like a gangster.” He was soon sent to the California Youth Authority, which is “basically the farm team for the Mexican Mafia.” As Corona was reincarcerated between criminal schemes, his involvement deepened in the harsh, regimented subculture of Mexican gangs, revolving around bloody conflict between northerners and southerners. In 1992, one such prison connection led him to employment with David Barron, an infamous cartel enforcer. The author takes readers on a violent ride, but many characters are only identified with street names, blurring the narrative. Although he writes of his regret, Corona’s storytelling still glamorizes gang life, with its focus on honor and loyalty expressed through violence. His memoir has a seedy authenticity regarding the nitty-gritty of how gangsters thrive in prison, prepare and transport weapons, stalk targets, and so forth. But Corona’s prose relies on clichés and pulpy digressions.
An unusual, self-aggrandizing, ground-level look at the dangerous milieu of Mexican cartels.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98462-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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