For Narcos fans and drug-war buffs.
Two former Drug Enforcement Administration operatives serve up a thriller-esque account of chasing down a notorious narco kingpin.
“It was our colleagues from the Colombian National Police who actually pulled the trigger, but after spending every waking moment going after that scumbag for six years, it was our victory as well.” So writes Peña at the end of a narrative in which he and Murphy—the agents who were portrayed in the Netflix series Narcos—take turns recounting the hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. The exultation at Escobar’s demise in a monsoon of bullets is a little unseemly, but one quickly comes to understand why the world should be happy that Escobar is gone—even if, as the authors allow, not a whole lot has changed, with actors on the bad side simply shifting roles and positions of authority. Among the players that Murphy and Peña describe is a “sicario,” or hit man, who boasted of killing more than 300 people on Escobar’s behalf. Most such foot soldiers were teenagers who lived for only a year or two before being killed by paramilitaries, vigilantes, rival gangsters, or the police, but while they lived, they were able to provide for their families in ways unavailable to otherwise unemployed youth. The narrative is a pretty by-the-numbers affair: There are the obligatory scenes of their early years and how they came to be federal agents, the academy hijinks, and the internal politics and interagency rivalries. The best part of the book is the authors’ portrait of two very different countries, Colombia and the U.S., and the different cultures of the police in each country. For example, one leading Colombian law enforcement official who figures prominently in their account was glad to yield to Escobar in negotiations, a concession that “prolonged the war against him and led to the deaths of thousands of innocent victims." Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo is by far the better book, but this one reveals enough interesting details to keep the pages turning.
For Narcos fans and drug-war buffs.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20288-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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.
