Rusty Young
Paperback | Pages: 400 pages Rating: 4.27 | 18481 Users | 834 Reviews
Details Books During Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail
| Original Title: | Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail |
| ISBN: | 0312330340 (ISBN13: 9780312330347) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Setting: | Bolivia |
Commentary In Pursuance Of Books Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail
Rusty Young was backpacking in South America when he heard about Thomas McFadden, a convicted English drug trafficker who ran tours inside Bolivia's notorious San Pedro prison. Intrigued, the young Australian journalisted went to La Paz and joined one of Thomas's illegal tours. They formed an instant friendship and then became partners in an attempt to record Thomas's experiences in the jail. Rusty bribed the guards to allow him to stay and for the next three months he lived inside the prison, sharing a cell with Thomas and recording one of the strangest and most compelling prison stories of all time. The result is Marching Powder.This book establishes that San Pedro is not your average prison. Inmates are expected to buy their cells from real estate agents. Others run shops and restaurants. Women and children live with imprisoned family members. It is a place where corrupt politicians and drug lords live in luxury apartments, while the poorest prisoners are subjected to squalor and deprivation. Violence is a constant threat, and sections of San Pedro that echo with the sound of children by day house some of Bolivia's busiest cocaine laboratories by night. In San Pedro, cocaine--"Bolivian marching powder"--makes life bearable. Even the prison cat is addicted.
Yet Marching Powder is also the tale of friendship, a place where horror is countered by humor and cruelty and compassion can inhabit the same cell. This is cutting-edge travel-writing and a fascinating account of infiltration into the South American drug culture.
Present Based On Books Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail
| Title | : | Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail |
| Author | : | Rusty Young |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 400 pages |
| Published | : | May 1st 2004 by St. Martin's Griffin (first published June 1st 2003) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Travel. Biography. Mystery. Crime. Autobiography. Memoir |
Rating Based On Books Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail
Ratings: 4.27 From 18481 Users | 834 ReviewsAssess Based On Books Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail
Such a great true life story, I didn't mind too much about the way it was written. What a fascinating life he has led and lived to tell the story. Loved it, would read again.This memoir of a British drug dealer's nearly five years inside a Bolivian prison provides a unique window on a bizarre and corrupt world. McFadden, a young black man from Liverpool arrested for smuggling cocaine, finds himself forced to pay for his accommodations in La Paz's San Pedro Prison, the first of many oddities in a place where some inmates keep pets and rich criminals can sustain a lavish lifestyle. McFadden soon learns how to survive, and even thrive, in an atmosphere where crooked
Where do I even start? Maybe the reason for reading. I am endlessly fascinated with correctional facilities, prisoners and corruption. I wont discuss particulars but this is one biography that you just inhale. The language is easy, and the story is magnetic. It evokes a sense of curiosity and fear; you feel the need to see these things for yourself much like the visitors that toured with him, but there is a little voice in the back of your mind that talks to what could and what does go wrong.
This is one of the easiest books to handsell in my shop. It's ideal for a long haul flight but just as good read at home during these long nights of curfew after Irma, Maria and the two flash flood tropical storms the media didn't mention. Thomas McFadden was a drug dealer in South America. He did it for the kicks and the money, he didn't do drugs himself. He relied on paying off a network of thoroughly corrupt officials and never gave thought to one of them might sell him out. Which they did.
Having lived in Bolivia for the first twenty years of my life, where the goings-on inside San Pedro are public knowledge, I can vouch for the veracity of the story exposed by Young / McFadden, although it reads as stranger than fiction. The bizarre, sometimes brutal, sometimes comic revelations of Marching Powder, are not as astonishing to me as they might be to someone unfamiliar with the way things are in South America, but even to my acquainted eye the book still made for interesting reading.
Drug runner Thomas McFadden was the epitome of a likeable rogue who lead a charmed life. But his luck ran out in Bolivia. The most unintentionally funny part of the book was Thomas's outrage that the corrupt Bolivian official he bribed betrayed him.Arrested and kept in a holding cell for thirteen days, Thomas was robbed by his arresting officers which left him no money to buy food. Frozen and starving Thomas begged to be moved to a prison. The officers found this desire to be moved to prison
I bought this book because my 'book lady' in Saigon recommended it to me and boy am I glad I did!! It is the amazingly true story of a drug trafficker from England who is caught and arrested in Bolivia where he is sent to San Pedro. When he arrives he is barely alive and it seems as though he has no chance of surviving. San Pedro is like no prison I have ever imagined could exist. For starters, prisoners have to buy their own cell. They have various sections to choose from to live in depending
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