A reformed assassin's tell-all of the horrors endured and executed throughout his years in the Mexican drug trade.
Editors Molloy (Research Librarian/New Mexico State Univ.) and Bowden (Murder City, 2010, etc.) introduce the reader to the mysterious El Sicario, a high-level killer speaking out for the first time. While the editors offer the necessary frontmatter and editorial work, the vast majority of the book is dedicated to the assassin's first-person account. El Sicario charts his path from poverty-stricken child to notorious killer, citing an incident in his early years in which an unsuccessful attempt to defend his older brother's honor ended in his own beating. “This caused a lot of bitterness inside of me,” he says. “And I was traumatized that I was not able to defend myself.” The experience emboldened the young boy, prompting him to dedicate his adolescence to becoming a drug mule, fully aware of the power and wealth that accompanied the risk. “To be sixteen years old and to be able to live like this!” he says. “To have money and to be able to invite any girl I wanted to go out to eat in nice restaurants with me.” His adulthood was spent as a corrupt Mexican police officer, offering him clear access into the corruption within the force. He exposes the systematic organization of the drug traffickers themselves, how groups are trained for a singular murderous purpose—all part of an elaborate system to “obscure the knowledge of where all of these bodies are buried.” While somewhat unique, El Sicario's tale is also quite familiar—one in which the power of money, drugs and women all play a role in achieving the necessary numbness required to carry out unspeakable crimes.
Pub Date: June 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56858-668-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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