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4 Werken 475 Leden 20 Besprekingen

Over de Auteur

Ioan Grillo has reported on Latin America since 2001 for international media, including Time magazine, Reuters, CNN, the Associated Press, PBS NewsHour, the Houston Chronicle, CBC, and the Sunday Telegraph. His first book, El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency, was translated into five toon meer languages and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Orwell Prize. A native of Britain, Grillo lives in Mexico City. toon minder

Werken van Ioan Grillo

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Algemene kennis

Gangbare naam
Grillo, Ioan
Geboortedatum
1973
Geslacht
male
Nationaliteit
UK
Woonplaatsen
Mexico City, Mexico
Agent
Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Leden

Besprekingen

This was a really good book. Grillo does an excellent job researching and reporting on the gun industry. Naturally that means talking about how guns are used, but -- more usefully, for me, as I didn't know much about this before -- he spends most of his time and text on how they are bought and sold.

That reporting is eye-opening. He traces a number of large problems, including international and domestic terrorism, the Central American economic crisis and resulting migration to the US, and the drug trade to illegal weapons trafficking. It's a convincing argument.

The book ends with some sensible prescriptions for ending that trade. Taking those steps wouldn't infringe the Second Amendment's right to bear arms, even as interpreted by most conservatives. But, he argues, it would limit the ability of criminals and terrorists to get them, and reverse some of the social ills that they cause around the world.
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mikeolson2000 | Dec 27, 2023 |
Well researched and interesting information, even though I don’t agree with some of the author’s conclusions.
 
Gemarkeerd
AMKitty | 3 andere besprekingen | Oct 15, 2021 |
Ambitious and Rambling with Some Good Details

"El Narco" is the Ioan Grillo's attempt to explain the ins-and-outs of Mexico's drug war. It is a very ambitious book that covers a lot of ground. It does not have a particular main idea that it follows.

The book reads like a collection of closely-related essays. Some of those essays have great details, such as an interview with an undercover DEA agent. However, Grillo spends a lot of effort describing the violent aspects of the war: beheadings, bloody gunfights, assassinations, and other gruesome aspects of the war. These seem to take precedence over Grillo's solutions and feelings about the drug war. As such, different chapters tend to go on and on.

Grillo frequently uses a frustrating tactic when writing. He writes pages and pages detailing phenomena, making conclusive statements and theses. Then, he writes "or is it?" and squeezes out the opposite thesis over more and more pages. Perhaps this tactic is an attempt to provide a more nuanced approach to the issues, but it ends up contradicted long passages and rambling.

A petty complaint from me is Grillo's use of slang. At different times in the book, he refers to cocaine as "the white lady," "yayo," "disco powder," and "blow."

While the book rambles quite a bit, it is the biggest attempt that I have read of an author trying to explain the origins and diagnosis of the crisis.
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mvblair | 14 andere besprekingen | Aug 9, 2020 |

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Statistieken

Werken
4
Leden
475
Populariteit
#51,908
Waardering
4.2
Besprekingen
20
ISBNs
34
Talen
4

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