Oscar Martinez. (2013). The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail. Verso Books.

Oscar Martinez. 2013. The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos On the Migrant Trail. Verso Books.

Oscar Martinez, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos On the Migrant Trail. Verso Books, 2013.

Oscar Martinez. The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos On the Migrant Trail. Verso Books, 2013.

OverDrive Product Record

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1. • value: us history
2. • value: Mexico
3. • value: immigrant
4. • value: Central America
5. • value: Mexican history
6. • value: drug trafficking
7. • value: migrants
8. • value: war on drugs
9. • value: Arizona
10. • value: Guatemala
11. • value: kidnapping
12. • value: crime
13. • value: drug war
14. • value: american history
15. • value: abuse
16. • value: American
17. • value: World History
18. • value: Honduras
19. • value: El Salvador
20. • value: Latin America
21. • value: illegal immigration
22. • value: violence
23. • value: Immigration law
24. • value: History
25. • value: survival stories
26. • value: Sociology
27. • value: history books
28. • value: immigration policy
29. • value: historical books
30. • value: narcos
31. • value: gifts for history buffs
32. • value: American history books
33. • value: sociology books
34. • value: history gifts
35. • value: history buff gifts
36. • value: history teacher gifts
37. • value: mexico history

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Martinez, Oscar
   • name: Oscar Martinez
2. • role: Author of introduction, etc.
   • fileAs: Goldman, Francisco
   • name: Francisco Goldman
3. • role: Translator
   • fileAs: Ugaz, Daniela Maria
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4. • role: Translator
   • fileAs: Washington, John
   • name: John Washington

imprint

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2013-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Beast

fullDescription

An Economist and Financial Times “Best Book of the Year”
 
“Harrowing” true stories from two years of immersion reporting on the migrant trail from Chiapas to Arizona—an “honorable successor to enduring works like George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier” (New York Times)
 
One day a few years ago, 300 migrants were kidnapped between the remote desert towns of Altar, Mexico, and Sasabe, Arizona. A local priest got 120 released, many with broken ankles and other marks of abuse, but the rest vanished. Óscar Martínez, a young writer from El Salvador, was in Altar soon after the abduction, and his account of the migrant disappearances is only one of the harrowing stories he garnered from two years spent traveling up and down the migrant trail from Central America and across the US border. More than a quarter of a million Central Americans make this increasingly dangerous journey each year, and each year as many as 20,000 of them are kidnapped.
Martínez writes in powerful, unforgettable prose about clinging to the tops of freight trains; finding respite, work and hardship in shelters and brothels; and riding shotgun with the border patrol. Illustrated with stunning full-color photographs, The Beast is the first book to shed light on the harsh new reality of the migrant trail in the age of the narcotraficantes.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: New York Times
   • content: "Harrowing....The graceful, incisive writing lifts "The Beast" from being merely an impressive feat of reportage into the realm of literature. Mr. Martínez has produced something that is an honorable successor to enduring works like George Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier" or Jacob Riis's "How the Other Half Lives."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Junot Díaz
   • content: "The most extraordinary (and harrowing) book I read this year. Beautiful and searing and impossible to put down."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Economist
   • content: "The world that Oscar Martínez, a Salvadoran journalist, set out to report on five years ago is so violent, depraved and hellish, you can hardly believe he survived to tell the tale... rugged prose, beautifully translated."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Columbia Journalism Review
   • content: "Martínez is a powerful storyteller and his approach to investigative journalism is closer to anthropological immersion: He walks with migrants through bloody forests, eats with them at spartan shelters, and rides with them atop speeding trains."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Review of Books
   • content: "The Beast, like so many great books, lands on you with a revelatory frisson, the arrival of a story we didn't know we were waiting to hear."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus
   • content: "... Martínez's debut is the hard-won result of immersive journalism."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Publisher's Weekly
   • content: "This searing account of the hardships suffered by Central American migrants headed through Mexico to the United States comes from true shoe-leather reporting."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Jon Lee Anderson, staff reporter for the New Yorker
   • content: "To understand the dramatic realities faced by the migrants who flee northwards to find work in the United States, Óscar Martínez literally jumped trains and dodged killers. He deserves praise not only for his efforts, and for what he writes about, but because he writes so very well."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Alma Guillermoprieto, Latin America correspondent for the New York Review of Books, author of Dancing with Cuba
   • content: "A heartbreaking book about the world's most invisible people. A revelatory work of love and hair-raising courage."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles
    • content: "Óscar Martínez is a journalist of uncommon bravery and a writer of prodigious talent. The Beast is a powerful, necessary book, one of the finest pieces of journalism to emerge from Latin America in years."
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 16, 2013
      This searing account of the hardships suffered by Central American migrants headed through Mexico to the United States comes from true shoe-leather reporting. In 2007 and 2008, Salvadoran journalist Martinez criss-crossed the most dangerous parts of Mexico to capture stories of Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans traversing what's increasingly become a criminal narco-state. Robbery, kidnapping, rape, and assault are "the inevitable tolls of the road" imposed by cartels that have branched out into human trafficking and extortion. Martinez observes that today, human trafficking and prostitution isn't "…a scar-faced man tending a cage of women. It's a complex system of everyday lies and coercions that happen just behind our backs." A journey marred by armed assaults and fatal accidents on "The Beast" (a freight train running north through the state of Oaxaca) is a trip "soaked with blood." This straightforward translation, first published in Spanish in 2010, doesn't flinch at migrants' plight, and as the drug wars further rend Mexico asunder, it's hard to imagine the situation changing.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 1, 2013
      Grim, grisly account of the predations suffered by impoverished migrants on the hazardous journey to el Norte. Previously published in Spain in 2010 and in Mexico in 2012, Martinez's debut is the hard-won result of immersive journalism. After several large-scale kidnappings of migrants, the author spent two years following the routes used by undocumented travelers though Mexico. He found that the rise of powerful, violent drug cartels has eradicated the rules of an already challenging journey; now, the migrants are universally viewed as human chattel to be exploited. Martinez writes precisely, with bleak gallows humor, as when he notes of cops unhappy with his investigation, "a dead migrant is commonplace, but a couple of dead journalists is another matter." Yet all his observations are numbingly bleak. He finds border cities, like the notoriously violent Ciudad Juarez, to be "racked by a madness akin to civil war," while the feared Los Zetas "have infiltrated everywhere. Not even the Army is clean." The narrative is a litany of horrors: casual murder, near-universal sexual assault and frequent accidental deaths via freight-hopping. Martinez portrays a Mexican society in which these pathologies are universally understood, yet cartel intimidation and bureaucratic corruption have destroyed the social order: "There is, simply put, nobody to assure the safety of migrants in Mexico." Meanwhile, the United States' high-tech border militarization has resulted in a "funneling" effect, forcing vulnerable migrants and drug smugglers to share increasingly constricted routes. "Where is it safe to cross? And the answer is, nowhere," he writes. "The US government has made sure of that." Martinez develops attentive portraits of the migrants, officials, aid workers and criminals he encounters; his first-person account is executed with passion and grit, illuminating a heartbreaking yet easily ignored reality. A harrowing look at the real costs of globalization, immigration and drug-prohibition politics, short on solutions and absent hope.

      COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

49

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An Economist and Financial Times “Best Book of the Year”
 
“Harrowing” true stories from two years of immersion reporting on the migrant trail from Chiapas to Arizona—an “honorable successor to enduring works like George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier” (New York Times)
 
One day a few years ago, 300 migrants were kidnapped between the remote desert towns of Altar, Mexico, and Sasabe, Arizona. A local priest got 120 released, many with broken ankles and other marks of abuse, but the rest vanished. Óscar Martínez, a young writer from El Salvador, was in Altar soon after the abduction, and his account of the migrant disappearances is only one of the harrowing stories he garnered from two years spent traveling up and down the migrant trail from Central America and across the US border....

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   • description: History / United States / State & Local / Southwest (AZ, NM, OK, TX)
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   • description: Social Science / Emigration & Immigration