A valuable contribution to the literature on the international drug trade and its seemingly limitless power.
A penetrating look at the failure of the war on drugs at the drug trade’s ground zero.
Because the war’s “primary battlefields are in Latin America and the United States’ own cities, most forget where it started: Southeast Asia.” So writes journalist Winn, reporting from the Golden Triangle of Myanmar (formerly Burma), where a de facto independent nation called the Wa State has emerged. The region was originally the site of a heroin epidemic that first swept through soldiers in Vietnam, then wound up in those very cities; the trade has evolved to include a veritable pharmacopeia, including the being the site for the largest seizure of drugs in the history of Asia: “55 million ya-ba pills and 1.5 metric tons of crystal meth, hidden in beer crates.” Ominously, while meth requires the chemical basis of a scarce substance called pseudoephedrine, Wa chemists have learned to make it from scratch, “new-age alchemy, turning lead into gold.” Winn follows generations of warlords, foot soldiers, and federal agents and informants, and by his account, the Wa State has flourished largely because of the American government’s missteps—and, in some instances, due to calculated assistance played out against a backdrop of geopolitics. One compelling player is an anti-drug crusader who later descended into heroin addiction, despairing under a regime whose kingpin was “a consummate capitalist” who had carved out minor satrapies for lesser narco-criminals. What is clear, Winn writes, is that the American government’s approach is ineffectual at least in part because officials seem not to understand that they are dealing with “a state that is wrapped around a meth cartel,” one that must be treated as a government on its own terms and that demands more nuanced diplomatic relations than it has been accorded to date.
A valuable contribution to the literature on the international drug trade and its seemingly limitless power.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781541701953
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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