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 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
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