Review by New York Times Review
MAMA'S LAST HUG: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, by Frans de Waal. (Norton, $27.95.) De Waal argues that we make a grave mistake when we pretend that only humans think, feel and know, and cites neurochemical studies to conclude that feelings like love, anger and joy are widespread throughout the animal kingdom. THE WHITE BOOK, by Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith. (Hogarth, $20.) In this latest novel from the author of "The Vegetarian," a Korean writer wanders the city of Warsaw, haunted by her family's losses - and by her country's inability to mourn its own. THE BORDER, by Don Winslow. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99.) The final volume of Winslow's monumental trilogy about the Mexican drug cartels and the American dealers, fixers and addicts who keep the trade flourishing. Whether good, bad or altogether hopeless, his characters are full of life and hard to forget. THE SOURCE OF SELF-REGARD: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, by Toni Morrison. (Knopf, $28.95.) Spanning four decades of Morrison's illustrious career, this collection includes a stirring eulogy to James Baldwin, a prayer for the victims of 9/11 and insights into "Beloved" and her other novels. DEATH IS HARD WORK, by Khaled Khalifa. Translated by Leri Price. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Khalifa's fifth novel about siblings reunited by their father's death during Syria's current war, wrestles with themes of societal demise and rejuvenation on a tableau every bit as haunted by violence as the swamps and redclay roads of Faulkner's South. SAY NOTHING: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe. (Doubleday, $28.95.) Part history, part true crime, Keefe's book uses the abduction and murder of a Belfast mother to illuminate the bitter conflict known as the Troubles. THE HEAVENS, by Sandra Newman. (Grove, $26.) This novel, which explores notions of time travel, romance and mental stability, features a heroine who comes to believe she lives simultaneously in Elizabethan England and 21st-century New York, with events in one period affecting life in the other. EMPIRES OF THE WEAK: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order, by J. C. Sharman. (Princeton, $27.95.) Taking in 1,000 years of history, Sharman makes the provocative case that European supremacy is a mere blip in mankind's narrative, which is in fact dominated by Asia. ON THE COME UP, by Angie Thomas. (Balzer + Bray, $18.99; ages 12 and up.) Set in the same neighborhood as "The Hate U Give," Thomas's riveting follow-up introduces an aspiring rapper. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
The publication of the concluding volume in Winslow's epic Cartel Trilogy represents a landmark moment in crime fiction, and it couldn't come at a more propitious time just as debate over the construction of Donald Trump's ballyhooed border wall has closed down the U.S. government. The intermingling of fact and fiction is even more omnipresent here than it was in the earlier volumes and this time, it includes a bloviating, would-be-wall-building president under investigation for his son-in-law's ties not to Russia but to the Mexican drug cartels. Connecting the dots from fictional characters and events to real-life ones will fuel much commentary in the coming weeks, but in the end, it is Winslow's remarkable ability to translate the utter fiasco of our 50-year War on Drugs the thousands upon thousands of lives lost in cartel-driven violence, the journalists assassinated, the addicts dead from overdoses as the heroin epidemic spreads across America into the most wrenching of human stories, tragedy seemingly without end, that gives this novel its unparalleled power. Winslow picks up the story of Art Keller, the DEA agent who has spent 40 years of his life fighting the War on Drugs, first in The Power of the Dog (2005) and then in The Cartel (2015), as he becomes head administrator of the DEA in 2014. His plan is to focus not only on what the cartels are doing in Mexico (killing cartel chieftain Aidan Barrera in the previous book has done nothing to stop the flow of drugs) but also on what happens on the American side of the border, especially on Wall Street, where hedge-fund operators, including the son-in-law of the soon-to-be president, make billions by laundering cartel money. Naturally, Keller makes enemies the closer his multiyear investigation draws to the White House, forcing him to worry that the skeletons in his own closet (who really killed Barrera?) will prove to be his Achilles heel. As fascinating as the details behind the power politics are, it is the parallel stories that Winslow tells alongside the D.C. plot that give the book its dimension, producing a kind of symphonic texture as we watch the cartel factions struggle to fill the vacuum left by Barrera's death and as we follow the perilous journey of two 10-year-old Guatemalans attempting to make their way to America and finding that hell takes many different shapes. There are multiple other, seamlessly integrated stories, too about an NYPD undercover cop tracking the drugs that the hedge-funders finance; about individual addicts who use those drugs; about a former hit man for the cartels trying to forge a separate peace but all of those stories come together in a crescendo of pain mixed with courage. Like Keller, Winslow has spent decades immersed in the drug wars, and his prodigious research and ability to combine massive amounts of detail into a structured whole show on every page of this trilogy. But coming through with equal force is his eloquence. Throw out all the endless babble we are subjected to about the border crisis and remember only this: ""A border is something that divides us but also unites us; there can be no real wall, just as there is no wall that divides the human soul between its best impulses and its worst. Keller knows. He's been on both sides of the border.""--Bill Ott Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In bestseller Winslow's stunning conclusion to his monumental Cartel trilogy (after 2015's The Cartel), Art Keller, now the head of the DEA, has spent decades waging a relentless campaign against the Mexican drug cartels. It's now late 2012, and Adán Barrera, Keller's longtime nemesis and the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, is missing and presumed dead. Violence soon escalates as the fractured remnants of Barrera's organization struggle against a host of new players vying for control of the drug trade. The bottom has fallen out of the marijuana market, and heroin has once again become the drug of choice for a new generation of Americans hooked on opiate painkillers. When fentanyl, a lethal new synthetic opiate, hits the streets, not only are poor minority users dying but well-to-do white kids are overdosing in record numbers. Keller knows like nobody else that America's "war on drugs" has been a complete failure, and he opts for a daring new clandestine approach: instead of targeting the suppliers in Mexico, he goes after the money in the States. With clear-eyed determination and an almost Shakespearean grasp of human nature, Winslow takes readers on an unforgettable journey. Agent: Shane Salerno, Story Factory. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Winslow's conclusion to his Cartel trilogy (The Cartel; The Power of the Dog) not only immerses readers in a terrifying world of crime and mistrust, it also showcases a situation that eerily ties in to current headlines. Art Keller has seen and experienced horror in his life, and when he receives a promotion to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), he soon realizes that the battle against the drug cartels in Mexico has financial ties to the U.S. government. A violent and harrowing journey plunges Keller into a scenario from which he might not find justice, and in the middle of it all he discovers that the border is imaginary when it comes to the war on drugs. Winslow mixes poetic prose with the modern crime tale and best fantasy novels to craft a thriller that is more than just a look at the fight to stop drugs from reaching the United States. VERDICT This story couldn't be timelier if Winslow had scheduled it directly with the federal government. It promises to deliver worthy discussions on several topics, making it perfect for a book group selection. [See Prepub Alert, 8/10/18.]-Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Winslow (The Cartel, 2015, etc.) wraps up his trilogy, 20 years in the making, on the war on drugs as it's played out on the U.S.-Mexico border.Art Keller is a man with enemies. Wherever he goes, he leaves a pile of bodies behind himnarcotraficantes, cops on the take, bad guys of every description. Sometimes he plies his trade in Guatemala, sometimes El Paso, sometimes D.C., wherever the white lines take him. But nowwell, he's in trouble, at war "against his own DEA, the U.S. Senate, the Mexican drug cartels, even the president of the United States." Someone is irritated enough at him, in fact, that a sniper has been dispatched to shoot up the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where Keller is paying his respects. That's guaranteed to tick Keller off, and so he goes into battle in a changed scenario: The hit men and Zetas of old are shadows of their former selves while the new generation struts around, as one does, in "a black Saint Laurent jacket that has to go for at least three grand." When Keller notices such stuff, it means you're on his radar, which is not where you want to be. He recruits a few like-minded warriors, and off they go. Well, some of them, anyway: "If you want to be in the real war, fly back to Seattle, pack your things, and be here ready to work first thing Monday morning," he growls to a kid who wants to go zipping around in helicopters with a knife between his teeth instead of manning a desk. The bad guys begin to drop off in a tale that's part Tom Clancy, part didactic and ever-so-gritty how-it's-done asides ("The Americans teamed with the Mexican marines on raids that were basically executions") and part old-school shoot'em-up: "Keller takes the policeman's sidearma 9mm Glockand moves through the trees toward the shooter."Jack Ryan's got nothing on Winslow's guy. An action-filled, sometimes even instructive look at the world of the narcos and their discontents. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
