Here are 100 books that Narconomics fans have personally recommended if you like
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I became passionate about the Mexico/US border question after meeting someone who is now a close friend, a Mexican academic who introduced me to some of the issues. She helped me write Saint Death as a way to explore the politics of ultra-capitalism, in the form of multinational business, and the action of drug cartels.
I could have picked almost any of Bowden’s books on the border, for example, the excellent Murder City, but I’m choosing Laboratory of the Future as it’s the first piece of his writing I came across. Bowden, who lived on both sides of the US/Mexican border for many years, was intimate with his subject, and the brutal power of his journalistic writing puts most novelists to shame. He is not afraid to question us or confront us, or hide his anger, but it is never unwarranted. In this book, he, and the thirteen Mexican photographers whose frequently shocking images accompany the text, paints a grim picture of the nature of ultra-capitalism when allowed to run free just south of the border – it is, he says, an experiment: it is the laboratory of our future.
Investigates the myth and reality of the current relationship between the United States and Mexico, with a focus on the more intimate connection between El Paso and the border town of Juarez. The photographers take on issues of immigration, NAFTA, gangs, corruption, drug trafficking, and poverty, and uncover a different Mexico.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I became passionate about the Mexico/US border question after meeting someone who is now a close friend, a Mexican academic who introduced me to some of the issues. She helped me write Saint Death as a way to explore the politics of ultra-capitalism, in the form of multinational business, and the action of drug cartels.
Dodson was an officer for the ATF working along the border with Mexico. He stumbled across the scandal behind Operation Fast and Furious, and rather than keeping quiet, he took the risky step of whistleblowing on covert operations by US government agencies in collusion with the drug gangs of Mexico, and the death of Border Patrol Agent, Brian Terry.
A hard-hitting inside account of the Fast and Furious scandal—the government-sponsored program intended to “win the drug war” by providing and tracking gun sales across the border to Mexico—from whistle-blower and ATF agent John Dodson.
After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, John Dodson pulled bodies out of the wreckage at the Pentagon. In 2007, following the shooting massacre at Virginia Tech, John Dodson walked through the classrooms, heartbroken, to cover up the bodies of the victims.
Then came Arizona. The American border.
Ten days before Christmas, 2010, ATF agent John Dodson awoke to the news he…
I have always strived to speak out when surrounded by silence, whether in person through my own voice, or through the books I have written and had published. Not because I am heroic or noble, but because I am angered by suppressed truth, and I believe reality should be shown as it is, not as people believe it should be. That is why the books I chose are so important to me, because they fearlessly exposed the truths the respective authors were determined to show, risks be damned. I hope these books inspire you as much as they have inspired me.
I loved this book because of the many years I spent living in Mexico and the deep connection I have to that country, culture, and its people. The sheer potency and ferocity from which the various authors wrote of the tragedies and struggles plaguing contemporary Mexico was astounding.
With bravery that is hard to fathom, the collection of celebrated journalists exposed the realities and truths of their beloved country that government officials, police, and military have killed to keep silent. I was angry, sad, moved, and inspired all at the same time while reading this book, and it showed me the power of writing as realistically as possible without compromise.
With contributions from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary - it has the power to change the world's view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the country's many sorrows.
Supported the Arts Council Grant's for the Arts Programme and by PEN Promotes
Veering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The so-called "war on drugs" has been a brutal and chaotic failure (more than 160,000 lives have been lost). The drug cartels…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I became passionate about the Mexico/US border question after meeting someone who is now a close friend, a Mexican academic who introduced me to some of the issues. She helped me write Saint Death as a way to explore the politics of ultra-capitalism, in the form of multinational business, and the action of drug cartels.
I wanted to include a book here on ‘Holy Death’ herself, Santa Muerte, but there simply isn’t a good one. There’s a terrible one published by a once respectable academic publisher, but I can’t recommend it. Instead, there are some passages on Santa Muerte in this huge and significant piece of work: Lomnitz’s encyclopedic book digs into Mexico’s deep roots to explore the long relationship the country has with Death, of which the still growing ‘cult’ of Santa Muerte is but one emanation.
Death and the Idea of Mexico is the first social, cultural, and political history of death in a nation that has made death its tutelary sign. Examining the history of death and of the death sign from the sixteenth-century holocaust to contemporary Mexican American identity politics, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz’s innovative study marks a turning point in understanding Mexico’s rich and unique use of death imagery. Unlike contemporary Europeans and Americans, whose denial of death permeates their cultures, the Mexican people display and cultivate a jovial familiarity with death. This intimacy with death has become the cornerstone of Mexico’s national identity.
Over my two decades as a scholar of American foreign policy and international politics, I had multiple opportunities to serve as a Latin America foreign policy aide. Given that Latin America plays a central role in the U.S.-hatched modern war on drugs, much of my policymaking was directly or indirectly tied to drug policy. I thus wrote Drugs and Thugs above all to make sure that I had a good sense of the history of this seemingly eternal conflict, one that is “fought” as much at home as abroad.
A work of intrepid journalism and sizzling writing, Grillo’sEl Narco is the result of upwards of a decade following the mercurial, terrifying evolution of Mexico’s drug cartels. I’ve taught this book to my Davidson College students studying Latin American politics and they repeatedly tell me that it is their favorite book they tackle in the course.
'War' is no exaggeration in discussing the bloodshed that has terrorized Mexico in the past decades. As rival cartels battle for control of a billion-dollar drug trade, the body count- 23,000 dead in five years - and sheer horror beggar the imagination of journalistic witnesses. Cartel gunmen have shot up schools and rehabilitation centers, and murdered the entire families of those who defy them. Reformers and law enforcement officials have been gunned down within hours of taking office. Headless corpses are dumped on streets to intimidate rivals, and severed heads are rolled onto dancefloors as messages to would-be opponents. And…
I am a multicultural published author from California. I attended different schools growing up, reading classic literature that I couldn't relate to, resulting in becoming a reluctant reader. I didn't live in historical time periods. My skin was a lighter shade of brown. In my world, I met kids from diverse backgrounds, who spoke slang and had personal hardships. Where were the books like that? That's why I wrote Graffiti Girl. To share a realistic, multicultural approach so the reluctant reader could have characters they could see themselves in. That's why I chose these books, in no specific order, that share contemporary, urban stories involving people of different cultures, who face unique hardships.
Street Pharm is a dark, cultural, and realistic look into Tyrone's life as a teenage drug dealer. A raw and urban story of a teen who inherits a life of crime because of the situation he was born into and the harsh awakening that comes with it. An intense and page-turning read that had me glued till the very end.
A successful teen drug dealer is forced to reexamine it all in this riveting novel, now in trade paperback with a new cover, from the author of Snitch.
Ty Johnson knows survival. The supply game’s in his blood. And now that he’s taken over his pop’s business, Ty’s smarts and skills have earned him some serious street cred. But Alyse knows nothing about Ty’s reputation, and he’s determined to keep it that way. She’s too beautiful, too brainy, too straight-laced to ever get involved with someone who deals. As long as Ty walks the line, life’s pretty sweet.
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
I write what I call civic noir, crime fiction where the real antagonist isn’t a person but an institution: a courthouse, a precinct, a city hall that already knows how the story ends. I’m drawn to these books because the most frightening thing in them is never the gun; it’s the machinery, the procedure, the quiet way a system decides who’s guilty before anyone enters a courtroom. As a writer, I’m less interested in the villain than in the architecture that produces him. These five novels taught me how to make a building feel dangerous, and how to keep ordinary people from disappearing into the gears.
This novel that taught a whole generation of us that the system is the story.
Price gives you the dealer on the corner and the homicide cop working his case with so much patience that you stop choosing a side and start watching the whole machine (corner, precinct, courts) grind everyone down to spare parts. Nobody writes dialogue that breathes like this. It’s no accident he went on to write for The Wire.
I return to this book whenever I need to remember that real authority lives in procedure, in paperwork, in who gets believed, and that you can render all of it without ever slowing the story down.
Rocco Klein, veteran homicide detective, has had enough of life on the edge. When a warm summer night brings yet another drug-related murder, he has no sense that the case is anything special. A young black man steps forward to confess but a little digging reveals that he's never been in any kind of trouble, whereas his half-brother, Strike, runs a crew of street-corner coke dealers 'clockers' in a nearby housing project. Soon Rocco is sure that Strike is the real killer and suddenly Rocco's appetite for the job is back. With a vengeance.
I am an author, attorney, artist, and entrepreneur. My experience as a litigator for over forty years, as well as my experience as a painter and an investor, has inspired and influenced me to write the Chance Cormac legal thrillers series.
When you enter Winslow’s world of drug cartels, be prepared for violence and intrigue at the US-Mexico border. Winslow vividly portrays the ongoing battle between the DEA and the cartels.
Power of the Dog is the first book in the Cartel Trilogy. Winslow takes the reader south of the border as the War on Drugs confronts the brutal realities of the drug trade and its victims.
'Breathtaking' JEREMY CLARKSON 'Winslow's masterpiece (so far) ... should have a place on every crime freak's bookshelf. Superb' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY _______________________ A brilliant page-turning thriller of power and revenge on the front lines of the drug war.
Drug lord Miguel Angel Barrera is head of the Mexican drug federacion, responsible for millions of dollars worth of cocaine traffic into the US and the torture and murder of those who stand in its way. His nephew, Adan Barrera, is his worthy successor.
Art Keller is a US government operative, so determined to obtain revenge for a murdered colleague that his…
I’m a scholar of gender and state violence, and I live and work at the US-Mexico border. For the past several years, I’ve worked collaboratively with large teams of Latinx-identified students to study the impacts of US immigration policies on migrants from Mexico and Central America. We realized that even though about half of immigrants are women, around 95% of deportees are men. So, we started to think about how US policies criminalize immigrant men. I became especially interested in how immigration enforcement (at the border and beyond) intersects with mass incarceration. In the list, I pick up books that trace the multinational reach of the carceral apparatus that comes to treat migrants as criminals.
Muehlmann’s beautiful, gripping book reveals how cartels and drug violence are not separate from everyday life, but instead interwoven with almost all facets of life on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border.
In a narrative style, she traces how everyday people unwittingly get into supporting the drug trade, or find themselves wrapped up in supporting traffickers without their knowledge. She also illustrates how the figure of the “narco” (drug trafficker) gets idealized in the borderlands. An incredible read for anyone interested in the complexity of the US-Mexico border.
When I Wear My Alligator Boots examines how the lives of dispossessed men and women are affected by the rise of narcotrafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the book explores a crucial tension at the heart of the "war on drugs": despite the violence and suffering brought on by drug cartels, for the rural poor in Mexico's north, narcotrafficking offers one of the few paths to upward mobility and is a powerful source of cultural meanings and local prestige. In the borderlands, traces of the drug trade are everywhere: from gang violence in cities to drug addiction in rural…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
Whether I read fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or prose, I especially love books by authors whose voices resonate with authenticity and originality, and who write imaginative page-turners about characters who change and grow personally, regardless of the difficulties they face in life. When their changes lead to creating conducive conditions for others to thrive, I feel gratified and inspired by them. As a practicing psychotherapist and writer I have devoted my career to supporting people in discovering and nurturing the creative sparks within themselves. My PhD in psychology and Post-Doctoral studies, presentations, and publications over the past 45 years have focused on the healing aspect of the creative process.
James McBride has an enormous gift for evoking the goodness in characters whose lives are perceived to be beyond redemption.
They inhabit the down and out realms of addiction, impoverishment, life on the streets, in housing projects rife with crime. And yet, he also reveals the faith and spirituality that binds them with love and humor, and provides them with the endurance for facing the ugliness and miracles in everyday life.
What I love most about Deacon King Kong is the surprising affection I feel for the characters that James McBride describes in hilariously creative ways, revealing the depths of their souls as well as the sins they rectify or try to cover up.
Never pious or self-righteous, these characters offer the heart of change and give us love!
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK CHOSEN BY BARACK OBAMA AS A FAVOURITE READ TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR, NEW YORK TIMES & WASHINGTON POST
'Brilliantly imagined, larger than life, a tragicomedic epic of intertwined lives.' JOYCE CAROL OATES
'Deeply felt, beautifully written and profoundly humane.' JUNOT DIAZ, New York Times Book Review
The year is 1969. In a housing project in south Brooklyn, a shambling old church deacon called Sportcoat shoots - for no apparent reason - the local drug-dealer who used to be part of the church's baseball team. The repercussions of that moment…
