An up-and-down true story about a time and place that has inspired plenty of fiction.
A saga of big risk and big reward within the romanticized pirate life of marijuana smugglers along the Florida Coast.
Wisconsinite McBride had no big plans or schemes when he followed a buddy to Florida and started working on a crab boat. However, he discovered that the moonlighting part of boat work could be unbelievably lucrative. “I got paid $50,000 for each of those hauls,” he explains of his early days as something of a pot-smuggling flunky. Such a sum soon seemed like chump change, as he became a conduit between Colombian sellers and Cuban buyers. This memoir, ghostwritten a couple decades after the fact, alternates adventures from the marijuana smuggling trade with life in prison, where McBride was sentenced to 10 years but served only four due to some cooperation and research in the law library. With marijuana now legal in some states and possession decriminalized in many others, the author seems to be writing of a whole different era, when smugglers made so much money that their main problem seemed to be where to spend or hide it all. “You can’t let all that money pile up,” he writes. “You’ve got to do something with it. Anything.” He relates how he once stashed $500,000 in the attic, only to discover that mice had eaten their way through half of it. McBride makes his business seem fairly benign compared to the more violent cocaine trade, as well as the Mexican drug wars that would follow the Florida crackdown. He was one of a few hundred who went to prison, sent in part by others who had sold them out for lighter sentences. He made his millions and he paid the price. He still doesn’t see anything wrong in what he did, and society now seems to agree that the war on this particular drug was likely misguided.
An up-and-down true story about a time and place that has inspired plenty of fiction.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05128-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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 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 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.
