(Nation Books, 320 pages, $27.50)
When Charles Bowden writes about Mexican drug wars, he deserves our attention, said John MacCormack in the San Antonio Express-News. The 64-year-old journalist has been filing dispatches from the streets of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, for the past 15 years, and his dramatic new book examines the recent explosion of violence that transformed the border city into the murder capital of the world. Bowden writes in an “exaggeratedly macho and melodramatic voice” that occasionally gives the book’s descriptions of shootings, torture killings, and gang rapes “an almost voyeuristic, pornographic feel.” But Murder City is an “important” work because it rejects conventional thinking that holds drug cartels responsible for Juárez’s ghastly violence. Bowden blames the United States instead.
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Bowden contends that the Mexican army is so corrupt that it’s no different from the cartels, said Oscar Villalon in the San Francisco Chronicle. Though the author never “convincingly corroborates” most such claims, he’s “asking the right questions” by trying to figure out who, if anybody, runs Juárez and the rest of Mexico. Yet because almost no one else is writing about these horrors, we need Bowden to do more than just string together a few strong character sketches into an “impressionistic” portrait of a troubled city, said Andrés Martinez in The Washington Monthly. His powerful writing may make Bowden the “poet laureate” of Juárez’s suffering, but for now readers will also “have to look elsewhere” to understand Mexico’s drug war in all its dimensions.
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