Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar
By Steven Murphy and Javier F. Peña
Page I bailed on: 104
Verdict: The title was a bad sign. This is a book about a couple of Drug Enforcement Administration agents who were part of the international effort to “take down” the Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar in the early 1990s. By the time I quit, a hundred pages in, I don’t think they’d even mentioned Escobar yet. It was all about the two agents telling their life stories and how they got into law enforcement.
I’m not a fan, to put it mildly, of the true-crime/memoir hybrid so this really wasn’t my sort of book. I didn’t care for El Jefe: The Stalking of Chapo Guzmán by Alan Feuerbook for much the same reason: the focus on the work of the agents rather than their target. Now for some readers that’s what they want, and to be fair neither book advertises itself as being anything else. But it wasn’t for me.
Alex Good 
Played by Boyd Holbrook and Pedro Pascal in the TV series, at least the authors are the real deal and not a couple of back room guys.
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Was the series any good? I got the DVDs of the first season out of the library but because I wasn’t grooving to the book I just returned them without watching any of it. I thought I might come back to it sometime.
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The series definitely fits the title of the book better than your book did. It is all about how they did what they did and it’s so well done. There’s a little bit of ‘life stuff’ as Murphy arrived with his wife & cat in tow at the beginning, I can heartily recommend it, and series 2. Not so much 3.
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OK, I probably will check it out at some point.
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DNF, DNF, DNF!
that makes us DNF buddies. We should start a club and go carpet bomb books on Devilreads. That would be living the good life….
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So many books not to read, so little time . . .
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It’s a thankless, never ending job. But someone has to do it!
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And not do it!
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Agree. Plus I hate drug lords like I hate the Mafia. I have a soft spot for drug runners being blown up at sea and would like to see them joined by their landlubbing confederates with some extraspecialjudicial justice, but that’s not quite the same thing.
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Hmm. I have some real doubts about those people getting blown up being drug runners. At least drug runners bringing stuff to the U.S. anyway. All the experts say that’s not the route they take. And there’s something strange going on there with sending that aircraft carrier down to cruise around. Seems like overkill.
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I’d applaud your skepticism if it weren’t for the fact that in the real world that kind of thinking inevitably leads to inaction. Ironically, you know who’d agree with me 100%? The Democrat cognoscenti. We are where we are because they’ve spent decades quietly *getting s#!t done*. Passing laws, setting up NGOs, pumping out their messages from every conceivable direction. They don’t like DT and MAGA not because he’s “unfit” or because they’re “deplorable,” but because he and MAGA want *action*. And because of their willingness to be occasionally wrong in pursuit of the greater good (which is a concept every parent understands, and everyone else too if they’d only admit it). In this case, drug runners or not (and I personally believe they were people doing bad things) it sure sent a message to drug runners. And like I say, I’d like to see that message delivered repeatedly and unequivocally until it is understood.
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This fits with my sense of one of the main sources of Trump’s appeal. He’s seen as someone who takes action and cuts through red-tape etc. Now my own feeling is that he’s causing more damage than doing things that are really productive or constructive (that tearing down the White House to build a ballroom really left me shaking my head), but like I say I get the appeal.
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See, this is all funny to me because it starts from a false premise: that America wasn’t on the verge of cultural collapse. You’re talking about “damage” to a system that was destroying the country! So, yeah, only someone content with the rapidly disintegrating status quo ante could fail to “get the appeal.” The appeal is the destruction of that monstrous system.
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Ah, this is further than I would go.
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