The world Sabbag takes the reader into is an extraordinary one, and the author’s eye for detail of setting, clothing,...
A wildly overwritten account of high times in the drug trade, filled with scenes that practically demand a life on the big screen.
Sabbag (Too Tough To Die, 1992, etc.) opens with the 1976 crash-landing of a marijuana-laden DC-3 on the coast of Colombia. How our hero (antihero?), Allan Long, came to be aboard a cargo plane overloaded with prime Colombian gold is revealed in astonishing detail in the chapters that follow. Sabbag, whose penchant for extended similes and extraneous biographical data on relatively minor characters unfortunately bogs down the pace, recounts the escapades of pot-smoking Long from his first teenage bust in 1966 to his departure from big-time smuggling in 1980. Documentary filmmaking was Long’s entry into the world of marijuana-smuggling, but he quickly moved from recording the action to participating in it. At first he smuggled marijuana from Mexico to California, combining his drug business with a second career as a promoter of rock-’n’-roll concerts. The lure of higher-quality pot and higher profits led Long to move on to Colombia, a complicated venture that eventually got him involved in a network of producers in Colombia, smugglers in Miami, and dealers in Michigan and elsewhere. Thousands of pounds of marijuana and millions of dollars later, Long, who is depicted throughout as nonviolent, quick-witted, and daring, saw the dangers to his life growing as fast as the stakes, and he eventually chickened out of the operation. An epilogue tidies up all the loose ends, revealing what became of Long—time in a federal penitentiary in the 1990s—and his former colleagues in the marijuana trade.
The world Sabbag takes the reader into is an extraordinary one, and the author’s eye for detail of setting, clothing, speech, and mannerism adds a you-are-there feeling to the narrative.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-76511-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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