Description
Book SynopsisA New York Times best book of 2024
On Barack Obama's Summer Reading List 2024
'Urgent, extraordinary . . . a tribute to the astonishing indomitability of the human spirit.' - Patrick Radden Keefe, bestselling author Empire of Pain
'Moving, sweeping, and masterful' - Sally Hayden, author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned
New Yorker journalist Jonathan Blitzer has been covering the immigration crisis at America’s southern border for nearly a decade, but the current emergency is the end of a much larger story. In this, his first book, Blitzer goes back to the beginning: to the shadowy civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s; to the American prison system in the 1990s and the policies of mass deportation that transformed local street criminals into international crime syndicates; to Honduras’s brutal crackdown on crime in the 2000s and the emergence of gangs acro