Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields

Charles Bowden is really two authors in one. The first author is a disciplined, unassuming journalist who writes good books like Frog Mountain Blues. The second author is an undisciplined, pretentious "creative writer" who writes bad books like Desierto. At least once, the good and the bad have come together to make a great book, Blue Desert, an edgy but perceptive pastiche of late twentieth century life in the desert Southwest. He tries to bring them together again in Murder City, but it doesn't work. It sets out to be a journalistic account of the terrible violence and chaos that the illegal drug trade has caused in northern Mexico, but quickly degenerates into a self-indulgent quest for the most horrific and grotesque examples of human degradation that Bowden can find. Bowden seems to come unglued when faced with Latin American culture, as though Spanish-speaking Americans were almost a different species than English-speaking ones-- scarier, but tougher and more "true to life." It's a left-wing, multiculturalist form of racism.

Great read! Amazing story!