The Robin Hood mantle draped over Pablo is a bit much, but his exploits will keep readers agog.
Pablo Escobar's brother and business partner recalls the Colombian drug lord’s outsized life and death.
Roberto tells Pablo’s story with a cool reserve. He makes no excuses for his brother’s crimes, but he wants readers to have a more rounded picture. In Roberto’s view, Pablo was not all bad. He was loyal, he was a family man and he had a streak of generosity to match his violence. Growing up poor, he soon discovered a knack for smuggling. The contraband was cigarettes at first, but he was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the cocaine boom, much of it fueled by U.S. users. It was purely a business decision, made without remorse: Cocaine was easier to smuggle than washing machines (another of Pablo’s specialties) and provided a much greater profit. The amounts of money involved were ludicrous; it was so difficult to find good hiding spots for tens of millions in cash that about ten percent was lost to water damage and rats. Pablo used submarines for his smuggling operations and had so many members of the army, police and state bureaucracy on his payroll that he rivaled the government as an employer. Yet the consequences of his trade were death and destruction, which rain down on almost every page of this memoir. Jaw-dropping events abound. Leftist guerrillas took over the Palace of Justice at Pablo’s request to seize papers that threatened his extradition to the United States. He built his own prison with the government’s assent and dispensed colossal sums to the impoverished and needy. “In Colombia,” Roberto explains, “poor people have always tried to help each other.” Pablo wasn't exactly underprivileged by the time he was dispensing alms, and the eerily detached way he gave execution orders doesn't buttress his brother's case for his charitable side. Nonetheless, his life makes for a grim, ensnaring tale.
The Robin Hood mantle draped over Pablo is a bit much, but his exploits will keep readers agog.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-17892-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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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