A suitably grim inside look at the front lines of the drug war.
A hard-boiled memoir from a former drug dealer who switched sides.
Caribe’s author biography credits him as “the most successful confidential informant in U.S. law enforcement history in terms of dollars of narcotics whose seizure he has helped facilitate,” and Cea is a former New York City detective who has written a memoir (No Lights, No Sirens: The Corruption and Redemption of an Inner City Cop, 2005, etc.) and worked as a producer on the Discovery Channel show Flipped. Consequently, this book combines the adrenaline-rush pacing of pulp fiction with a memoir’s grounding in truth. “The Beltrán brothers were a combo of Pablo Escobar, Pol Pot, and Attila the Hun all rolled into one,” write the authors, who go on to describe them as “two ruthless killers responsible for thousands of murders in Mexico and the United States.” Caribe worked for the “ruthless, hard-hitting Cuban thug” who represented the Mexican cartel in the U.S., a criminal every bit as much a bad guy as the Beltrán brothers. Helping push those drugs for a decade might have marked Caribe as a bad guy himself, but in this narrative, he is a loving husband and father who somehow happened to make a wrong career turn and decided to turn his life around, fortuitously, just before his arrest, which he calls “the best thing that could’ve happened to me.” The rest of the book shows the process by which he made his deal to “switch flags” and set up a couple of major drug busts worth many millions before settling into his identity as “C.S. 96” and ultimately finding redemption as an ordained minister. Caribe’s memory for paragraphs of quotes tests credulity as nonfiction, but the pacing and tone should satisfy readers hungry for the real nitty-gritty.
A suitably grim inside look at the front lines of the drug war.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-31537-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
