A captivating work of investigative journalism focusing on drug trafficking.
This eclectic combination of journalism and academic research aims to debunk persistent myths about the drug trade in the United States.
Gundur observes that Americans’ perceptions of the illicit drug trade in their country are in many respects deeply inconsistent with the available evidence. While they often assume that it is driven by “members of a nefarious underworld far from the lives of decent people,” drug trafficking in American cities is largely run locally, either by gangs or various subcontractors, with little knowledge or contact with foreign cartels. Moreover, most of those gangs that facilitate the drug trade do not comprise immigrants, illegal or otherwise, but are groups forged in the violent crucible of the American prison system. Contrary to popular misconception, most immigrants are law-abiding and have no connection to the drug trade, and cities like El Paso, Texas, that share a border with Mexico are not engulfed in violent crime, but are among the safest in the U.S. Gundur meticulously unpacks the entangled underworld of drug trafficking, one he convincingly argues has only been strengthened by America’s irrational war on drugs. In addition, he limns a remarkable firsthand account of the immigration process, one that unfairly disadvantages those genuinely seeking asylum in the country from extraordinary dangers.
The author’s overview relies heavily on what he calls “gonzo research,” a process whereby he embeds himself in cities like Phoenix and Chicago in order to gain intimate knowledge by virtue of spontaneous conversations and unplanned experiences. The result of his 10 years of work is a vivid tableau of life in places like Juárez, Mexico, a needful corrective to the cinematic caricatures that present only the squalor of criminal enterprises. But Gundur’s depiction still struggles from internal contradictions. For example, on the one hand, he portrays Juárez as a “city of opportunity” where most families can lead normal lives. But he also criticizes the U.S. for failing to recognize how deeply the gang violence in Juárez has affected those attempting to escape to America. Similarly, he downplays the effect of drug trafficking on El Paso, but concedes: “In El Paso, you are never too far away from someone involved in the drug trade if you know where to look.” While the author is correct that the cartels have little presence in these cities and that the violence produced by the drug trade in places like El Paso is routinely overstated, he admits that El Paso is a “prime transshipment point” for drugs, the vast majority of which comes from Mexico. Moreover, the entire book rests on a clumsy caricature of those concerned with border security as bearers of “anti-immigrant sentiment,” precisely the kind of sweeping generalization he aims to undermine. The author also sometimes indulges in overstatement—one can reasonably criticize Donald Trump’s immigration policy as profoundly misguided and even ultimately inhumane, but Gundur never presents a compelling argument that its explicit design was to inflict cruelty. Despite these flaws, this book is an illuminating study and a valuable contribution to an issue shrouded in misconceptions.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781501764462
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
