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