As you may have heard, the Los Angeles Review of Books–a.k.a. “the first major, full-service book review to launch in the 21st century”–has recently gone live. For the past month, they have been posting an essay a day about everything from MFA octopi to social Darwinism to the Tall Redhead Syndrome. Last week, they posted my review of Ed Vulliamy’s Amexica: War Along the Borderlines. Here’s a taste:
It starts with a headless body dangling from an underpass called Bridge of Dreams. A bed sheet unfurls beside it, sending a message from one drug cartel to another. Hours before firemen come to cut down the corpse, venerated British journalist Ed Vulliamy arrives on the scene. He takes everything in, noting how the straps beneath its armpits “creak”; how its feet “flap in the wind.” Yet he is equally transfixed by the crowd that has gathered in “unsurprised silence.” They gawk “at this hideous, buckled thing, perhaps fearing, if they leave, they might take with them the curse of that which was done.”
Readers of Vulliamy’s Amexica: War Along the Borderline quickly find themselves in a similar quandary. Page after page depicts horrifying violence rendered in grisly, though compelling, detail. As Vulliamy (disturbingly) notes, “the feral physical cruelty of the slaughter accentuates the borderland’s sensuality and libido.”
The spotlighted border is, of course, the 2,100 miles shared between the United States Read the rest of this entry »
