Rusty Young

This is an interesting book. It is not exactly a true story, but it is based on true stories of people who fought in the Colombian Civil War on the guerilla side. It gives a good view of why people did what they did.

The story is heavy and sometimes hard to read. But it also was compelling and the characters were passionate and realistic. I did get the feeling that I understand a bit better what went on in Colombia and why some really young people fought as guerillas.

But aside from the context of the book, it is a great story about a boy wanting revenge for his father's death and his adventures on the way of getting that revenge. I grieved and cheered, was sad and laughed and sometimes I was stunned. A great read.… (lisätietoja)

Concur w/ Raghu's 10/25/10 review, much of which is duplicated below:

Rusty Young's 'Marching Powder' is the real-life account of Thomas McFadden, a black Englishman and cocaine trafficker, and his nearly five years in the San Pedro prison in La Paz, Bolivia. What is bizarre and unusual and incredible about the book is the nature of the San Pedro prison. One is used to hearing about notorious third-world prisons where corruption, crime, violence and inhumanity is rampant. Police brutality and corrupt judges are generally the rule. San Pedro has all these and so that is not unusual. But San Pedro also is a prison where the prisoners have to buy their own cells in which they live. The cell is bought just like any other piece of real-estate in the outside world. Inside San Pedro, prisoners live with their wives and children and the children go to school outside as if they are living in a regular suburb! Some prisoners run grocery shops or restaurants. Side by side, there are laboratories which make pure cocaine which is sold to inmates as well as to the outside world. All of this goes on under the nose of the prison guards and governor who are, of course, bribed. As if this is not enough, Thomas McFadden also runs tours of the prison for backpackers visiting La Paz and backpackers get to spending even nights in the prison to get the 'full experience'! The prison also has annual elections where inmates are elected as representatives.
Rusty Young is one of those backpackers who gets to meet Thomas McFadden and eventually ends up spending three months inside the prison and writing this book on San Pedro and Thomas' life inside. McFadden eventually gets released after bribing the judges and spending nearly five years inside.
For people on the outside like us, who live a regular life and mostly being law-abiding citizens, the book is exciting to read as it opens up a world that we are not purview to. I was fascinated by the first chapter itself where McFadden describes the process of packing cocaine in suitcases so that even the sniffer dogs cannot find it and how he surveys an airport and identifies who the drug-busting security personnel were and how he will conduct himself to throw them off his trail. Elsewhere he describes the process of sending small amounts of cocaine by regular postal mail without the customs finding it and how he uses probability as one of the tools. Other interesting aspects of the book are the concern the inmates have for children inside the prison and how they would avoid violence in the presence of children. When a young six-year old girl gets raped and murdered inside the prison, the inmates vow to catch and punish the perpetrator with a sense of determination that is not found in civil society outside.
The book is sympathetic to Thomas McFadden and generally paints Bolivia as a corrupt, violent and cruel society as seen from the prison. But a reader cannot escape the feeling that McFadden was ultimately a cocaine trafficker and he was caught red-handed in Bolivia for which he was sent to prison. The narrative does not indicate that he really repented for the act of trafficking because he trades in cocaine till the time he was released...
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There's something which captures the imagination in a book which is non-fiction but reads as fiction. Being naturally suspicious, I had trouble buying into the facts as presented in the book. So I tried to research the factual aspects of the book, and found various supporting sites, including respected news sources such as BBC, which support McFadden's accounts. So now I believe, which made the book that much more amazing.… (lisätietoja)

This was a much more in depth read than I anticipated, having not really read the blurb, I thought it was going to be more like a YA book with a lot of action and guns.

It was so much more.

It was the carefully detailed account of a young boy as he becomes a man, amidst the unimaginable trials and difficulties presented to him by corruption, drugs warfare and murder, told over the span of several years. He grows both physically as a man, and emotionally as a person, makes friends and navigates the difficulties of a multitude of agendas held by people who could genuinely kill him.

It was also the story of his friends and relationships with them, his family and where they fit into the complex puzzle, and the way the political situation amplified the normal elements of mid to late teenaged years.

It was the sort of book I wanted to come back to at every opportunity, but that I had to devote time where I was not distracted so I could really absorb all aspects of the story.

… (lisätietoja)