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
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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