|
BOOKS ABOUT COCAINE
| Link |
What others have said... |
|
|
Boil off Streatfeild's informal tone a mix of self-deprecation and gonzo-journalist swagger and what's left is a fascinating and richly detailed story of the world's most notorious drug and an illicit $92-billion-a-year industry. Streatfeild, a British documentary film producer, visits its every outpost, from Bronx crack houses and Amazonian coca plantations to Bolivian prisons and the compounds of South American drug lords. He launches the story with a history of the coca leaf and its prominent place in both ancient and contemporary consciousness, tackling race, poverty, class, violence, mythology and xenophobia as seen through the prism of cocaine. There are countless strands to the story, and Streatfeild follows every one: the rise of the Colombian cartels, government collusion with traffickers, the crack phenomenon, media hype, the U.S. war on drugs and the legalization debate. The author lights up the myriad figures who feature in cocaine's history: Columbus, Freud, Pablo Escobar, Manuel Noriega, George Jung, even Richard Pryor and the late basketball star Len Bias. He picks the brains of botanists and economists, lawmen and guerrillas, addicts and kingpins, and travels extensively throughout the Americas. The main drawback: Streatfeild's insistence that the reader be privy to superfluous research details such as fizzled leads, false starts, wrong turns and boring authors. In the end, though, Streatfeild delivers a straight tale about a world where nothing is as it seems |
|
|
Losing his "nasal virginity" in an adventure into the wonders and horrors of cocaine addiction, the central character finds his answer to insecurity and social ineptitude in a potent white powder as his peer in The Overcoat seeks the same comfort in a dark, tattered garment.
If the pseudonym doesn't give it away, this anonymous author provides another dim glance into nineteenth century St. Petersberg that seems a brushstroke within the same portrait alongside those by Gogol and Dostoevsky. Imagine the Underground Man not tormenting his maid, but out in the streets snorting cocaine, searching for a female companion.
Novel with Cocaine is not essential reading, but it is another worthwhile glimpse at the literary products of desperate and dark nineteenth century St. Petersberg. Glorification of drug use is a problem in the late twentieth century. Novel with Cocaine will force you to think again with grave reluctance that neither McInerney nor Ellis have been able to posit in the minds of their readers.
|
|
|
I have read this book about twenty times and love it as much each new read as I did the first time. Elizabeth is a phenominal writer and takes a person to the depths of addiction, through her dispair, and pain, and brings you back to her normalicy which is only normal in the way an addicts life can be. You feel her misery and hold your breath with each twist her story brings. I'm too tired to write a longer review or I would. Just read it and you'll understand what an addicted woman goes though when she's in the trenches and how hard it is to get sober no matter what you have. I'm a recovering addict and she told my story minus the Harvard education. Elizabeth is great and so is her book. It's entertaining as hell even if you could care less about addiction. |
|
|
Snowblind is an all-out, nonstop, and now classic look at the cocaine trade through the eyes of smuggler Zachary Swan. In a brief Roman-candle career, Swan served an elegant clientele, traveling between Bogota and the nightclubs of New York, inventing intricate scams to outmaneuver the feds. Creating diversions that were characteristically baroque, surviving on ingenuity and idiot's luck, he discovered in the process a hip, dangerous, high-velocity world that Robert Sabbag evokes with extraordinary power and humor. |
|
|
Castillo, a former DEA field agent, stationed in Central America became an unwitting witness to the CIA's, Oliver North's, and the Reagan Administration's involvement in the smuggling of cocaine to fund the Contra army. Published years before the 1997 San Jose Mercury News/Gary Webb article, "Dark Alliance", about the CIA's role in bringing crack to the streets of America, Castillo provides a shocking but entirely credible story from the inside. Castillo, during the course of his field investigations into cocaine smuggling, inevitably ran into the CIA's cocaine network. A fly-drugs-up/fly-guns-down network operated by Oliver North, Richard Secord, and CIA front company Southern Air Transport out of the Ilopango airbase in El Salvador. He was repremanded time and time again by his DEA superiors for sticking his nose places it didn't belong. Warned off by claims he was endangering missions critical to our National Security. Yet, Castillo continued to file tell-all reports to the DEA in Washington. This is the story of the uncovering of these revelations, and one man's fight to expose the truth and bring these injustices to light. I highly recommend it. |
|
|
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair take the revelations of the links between the Central Intelligence Agency, the Nicaraguan Contras, and the Los Angeles crack market that journalist Gary Webb exposed in 1996--revelations that are the basis of Webb's book Dark Alliance--and use them as a springboard for a tale of the U.S. government's involvement with the illegal drug trade that extends much further back than Webb's tale.
The specific revelations are not, perhaps, entirely new; many know, for example, that even before there was a CIA, the WWII-era Office of Strategic Services enlisted the aid of gangster "Lucky" Luciano in arranging support among the Sicilian Mafia for the American invasion of Italy, or that the CIA was actively involved in the Southeast Asian opium trade during the Vietnam War. But Cockburn and St. Clair persuasively argue that the traditional explanation for such events--"rogue elements"--is deliberately misleading, and that the mainstream "liberal" press plays an active role in this obfuscation (noting, for example, that Webb's three biggest attackers were the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post). By providing an overarching narrative rather than treating these incidents as isolated, the authors present a damning indictment of the CIA--but one that fully admits that the agency was not acting on its own, but was merely fulfilling the mandates of the American government. --Ron Hogan
|
|
|
This book convincingly explains how the wheels came off of American democracy in the decades following WWII. Many conservatives decry revisionist history. This book shows with power and eloquence that no American citizen can afford to accept conventional history as supplied by the US media. Robert Parry has lived and breathed Iran-Contra since he broke the story as an AP reporter in the mid-80s. Utilizing media reports, DEA reports, declassified CIA reports and named and unnamed inside sources he shows how the Reagan administration devastated Central America and facilitated large scale importation of drugs into the US to finance Contra operations against Nicaragua. This is the most fascinating and important book I have read this year. It is essential reading for anyone who values democracy and has the courage to face recent US history and work for change. |
|
|
Coauthor Marshall's recent Drug Wars ( LJ 2/15/91) shows how Washington overlooks or supports drug trafficking as part of its efforts to thwart Third World communism around the world. This new book explores in detail the tangled connection between the Nicaraguan Contras, U.S. support for them, and drugs. Marshall and Scott argue that the United States might actually have furthered the flow of cocaine from Central America to the States by colluding with anti-Sandinista forces. Government intimidation of witnesses, a complacent Congress, and timid media have served to keep this a quiet story. Extensive interviews, government records, and secondary sources (enough, in fact, to produce over 60 pages of cited sources), are used to document in great detail how the war on communism took precedence over the war on drugs. An authoritiative account of a crucial but underpublicized issue.
|
|
|
I found this book to be one of the best I have ever read at exploring the tensions and struggles with living among, working with, and writing about poor, inner-city minorities. The book is relevant to, and I believe would be helpful to, social workers, educators, ethnographers/researchers, policy makers, and more. The author does an EXCELLENT job at making clear that there are not easy answers. In ways, of course, the people in the book are victims of poverty, of disenfranchisement, of racism.... But, as other reviewers have pointed out, they are also often violent people who take part in such awful acts as gang rape. How does that come together? As people who work in or write about such communities (or make laws that apply to those who live there) how can we understand these contradictions? What role can we play in that? What responsibility to the privileged of the US have to those who are severely underprivileged?
This book explores both the technical aspects of the underground economy, specifically crack, as well as the moral and ethical questions that surround it.
I did find that the book has shortcomings-- as other reviewers have expressed, I'm not sure how comfortable I was with some of the "takes" Bourgois has on some of the people and situations in the book. However, I believe that there is no perfect book out there, especially on such a difficult and complex topic, and that over all the book is very important in exploring and addressing the issues that surround inner-city life and, in particular, the drug trade.
|
|
|
Bret Easton Ellis is a writer with an undeniable place in American literature from the 1980's through the year 2005 (with his creepy, messed-up, first-person haunting account in Lunar Park). His debut novel, Less Than Zero, captures an important piece of history--the lives of 1980's club kids. I was shocked and titillated to read about the drugs, the decadence, the male prostitution, and so on. By the end of the novel, I was thoroughly disgusted with the mindless self-indulgence of the main characters, which was precisely Ellis's point in writing this novel. If you are looking for shocking violence, drug use, self-abuse, sex, and the like, this is the book for you.
If you enjoyed reading about the 1980's drug-culture jet-set crowd, try Jennifer Saginor's Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion. She was a contemporary of Ellis and her memoir is outstanding.
|
|
|
Twenty-six-year-old Larry Lavin, a gregarious, civic-minded, affluent Philadelphia dentist, headed a 12-state drug network through which he supplied his customers, many of them former prep-school and University of Pennsylvania friends who, in turn, often became dealers themselves. In this expanded version of a Philadelphia magazine article, Saline, coauthor of Straight Talk, recounts how he organized the drug ring and the FBI's four-year investigation, which led to the convictions of Lavin and 82 co-conspirators in 1987. Along the way, the author also provides an alarming insight into the extent of student addiction in a suspenseful tale of international intrigue involving a gallery of Ivy League clients, drug runners, Cuban and Colombian cocaine suppliers and mafioso distributors. |
|
|
Larry Lavin is a brilliant, complex person, who, despite his enormous crime, emerges as likeable. One cannot help but think, "what a waste!" This is the story of a man who truly had everything: brains, looks, loyal wife, money career, and beautiful children. Yet, he threw it all away. Fascinating account of Lavin's ascent from poor working-class Massachusetts kid with disillusioned father to dental student to coke lord to inmate. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
