Cav > Books: crime‎ (61)

"...The practice of building a personal collection of curious objects goes back centuries, although it wasn’t until the 1600s that they really started to take off in Europe. By the 1700s, the trend had spread even to England.
These “wonder rooms,” as they were sometimes called, usually served two purposes. They offered a fun hobby for bored aristocrats to show off their wealth and well-traveled light fingers. Think of them as the private souvenir drawers of various European colonizers, with all the complex baggage that comes with that language."

"...For more than a year I’d bided my time, waiting for the right moment to escape. I was eighteen years old and scared to death that my carefully laid plans might backfire. But my heart was full of rebellion against the constant fear, cruel rules and ancient customs that stifle and sometimes kill girls like me in Saudi Arabia. And it soared when I imagined a life away from them.
I had my phone, but my passport was with my eldest brother. Getting it and hiding it so I would have it when the time came to run was key. I was trying to be cool, trying to look like the dutiful daughter packing for a holiday, trying to calm the waves of anxiety as I watched from my bedroom the family prepare for departure and then gather for lunch before setting out for Kuwait."

"...In Revenge of the Tipping Point, I want to look at the underside of the possibilities I explored so long ago. If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who knows where and when to push has real power. So who are those people? What are their intentions? What techniques are they using? In the world of law enforcement, the word forensic refers to an investigation of the origins and scope of a criminal act: “reasons, culprits, and consequences.” Revenge of the Tipping Point is an attempt to do a forensic investigation of social epidemics."

"Three years ago, the HISTORY network told me that if I gave them a list of my favorite historical mysteries, they’d give me a team to help solve them. From there, Buddy Levy, Christine McKinley, Scott Rolle, and our amazing producers and crew have become true family. Together, we’ve explored some of the greatest conspiracies (and myths) that history has to offer.
To me, history is a giant game of telephone. What’s vital is finding the first whisper. Yet of all the questions people ask us about conspiracies, the number one is simply this: Which is your favorite?
And so, this book. Inside, you’ll see our favorites, counting down from the mysteries surrounding the Lincoln assassination, to the search for Confederate gold, to the existence of UFOs, to . . . well . . . like I said, you’ll see..."

"But what’s uncommon knowledge is that if you take that universal law of storytelling and combine it with the fact that Marvel and DC are owned by the Walt Disney Company and AT&T’s Warner Media LLC, respectively, then you uncover a terrifying truth. Two of the most powerful multinational corporations on the planet have spent decades, in plain sight, paying some of the most creative people alive today to design increasingly credible world-domination schemes—and these schemes have been thwarted only by chance, by circumstance, by the pins we writers have carefully inserted into our own grenades. Once you understand that, it doesn’t take much to wonder: What if the supervillain didn’t have to lose? What if the heroes faced a scheme so clever and bold and audacious and unprecedented that it could never be predicted, much less foiled? And if a supervillain could do that in fiction, what’s to stop someone else from doing it in real life? That was the origin of this book: that moment when I realized that not only have I spent years working on ways to take over the world, but thanks to my background in science[*] . . .
. . . I’ve actually figured it out.
And unlike most supervillains, I’m more than happy to share."

"We’re addicted to the cheapness and convenience of fossil fuels, and even after we’ve invented and invested in renewable fuel sources like solar, hydroelectric, and wind power, those are often used to supplement our ever increasing desire for power, rather than to fully replace fossil-fuel generation."

"From nearby Seoul to faraway Washington, DC, many government officials and analysts boldly predicted—sometime in whispers, sometimes in shouts—widespread instability, a mass exodus into China, a military coup, imminent collapse. Behind all the doom mongering was one shared thought: surely this regime couldn’t survive the transition to a third totalitarian leader called Kim, much less to a twentysomething who’d been educated at fancy European schools and had an obsession about the Chicago Bulls—a young man with no known military or government background..."

"Death was all around us. We’d enter the market in the mornings to find women wailing and rocking in their arms children who had died during the night. As we plunged deep into the merchants’ stalls, we found the corpses of old men and women, mouths still agape as if, in their final moments, they wanted to say something, their eyes staring out, pleading with us to hear them. I always thought the place after death was peaceful. It was how my eomeoni had described it. But what I saw on the faces of the dead was anything but. It was as if they had got stuck looking at and feeling all their grief and pain..."

"Time is a motherfucker. Time reveals shit. It wears things down. Breaks things. Crushes things. Kills things. Reveals truth. There’s nothing greater than Father Time.
If you have patience, time will be on your side. And if you recognize how valuable time is, and if you know the right time to make your move, you’ll be a bad motherfucker.
That’s how I feel right now writing this book. The time is now for me to write all this shit down. It’s time to write down not only my legacy, but the story of nine dirt-bomb street thugs who took our everyday life— scrappin’ and hustlin’ and tryin’ to survive in the urban jungle of New York City—and turned that into something bigger than we could possibly imagine, something that took us out of the projects for good, which was the only thing we all wanted in the first place..."

“C.R.E.A.M.” is a true song. Everything Inspectah Deck and Raekwon said is 100 percent true. Not one line in that entire song is a lie, or even a slight exaggeration. Deck did sell base, and he did go to jail at the age of fifteen. Rae was sticking up white boys on ball courts, rocking the same damn ’Lo sweater. And of course, Meth on the hook was like butter on the popcorn. Meth knew the hard times, too, being out there smoking woolies and pumping crack, etc. That raspy shit he was kicking just echoed in everyone’s head long after the song was done playing.
The realism on “C.R.E.A.M.” is what resonates with so many people all over the world. People everywhere know that sentiment of being slaves to the dollar. Cash is king, and we are its lowly subjects. That’s pretty much the case in every nation around the world, the desperation to put your life and your freedom on the line to make a couple dollars.
Whether you’re working, stripping, hustling, or slinging, whether you’re a business owner or homeless, cash rules everything around us..."

"...But I still kept getting kicked out of the booth. The only thing I knew was that I had to keep going. I had no other choice to get it right. No was not an option for me. That’s when I learned about the difference between being a warrior—a champion, really—and a regular person. It was the
difference between giving up and getting back up and trying again. Some people take a loss and it breaks them spiritually. A true champion is a motherfucker who can take a loss and rise back up with a full heart and keep going until he wins. I got kicked out of the booth over and over, but every time I picked myself back up and got back in there. I never, ever stopped trying."

"Our journey here was rough, no doubt. We lost our brother Dirty along the way, but the rest of us are still here, still alive, still bringing it. We’re not posted up in front of 160 anymore, ducking cops and bullets, scrambling for drug money while dreaming of stardom and getting out of the projects. We’ve done that. We’re not locked up or on parole pissing in cups. We left all that shit behind us years ago. We’ve achieved fame and success the likes of which most people can only dream about, and in the right circumstances, we’ll do it again.
Yeah, we don’t always get along, but what family does? But just give us time to come back together, and we’ll show everybody that the Wu- Tang Clan still ain’t nothin’ ta fuck wit’!"

"...I myself became curious about the drug when my father, a retired judge, started to consider giving microdoses of LSD to my mother to treat her Alzheimer’s disease. He had asked me why, if the drug was actually supposed to help, he couldn’t just get it at the pharmacy. This launched me on my research.
The more I dug into the history, the more fascinated I became. I began to see how much of the early history of LSD was shaped by the shadow that lies over the molecule, a result of the personal connection between a Swiss pharmaceutical CEO named Arthur Stoll, a kind of unwilling forefather of psychedelics, and Richard Kuhn, the leading biochemist for the Third Reich. This relationship aided the National Socialists, who were beginning to study the use of psychedelics as potential “truth drugs”—questionable research, which, after the war, sparked the interest of the US military and its intelligence agencies in these substances.
This book is what emerged from my curiosity. In this moment when, after many decades, we are finally reconsidering the nature of our laws surrounding psychedelics, it feels more important than ever to look backward and understand how we arrived at those regulations in the first place."

"...Its passion and parables, and its characters, are nowadays better known than those of the Bible. Instead of the triumphal ride into Jerusalem, the Last Supper and the betrayal at Gethsemane, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the Supper at Emmaus and the coming of the Holy Ghost in tongues of fire, we have a modern substitute: Winston the outcast prophet in the wilderness, living on cigars and champagne rather than locusts and wild honey, but slighted, exiled and prophetic all the same. We have the betrayal at Munich, the miraculous survival of virtue amid defeat at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain, and the resurrection of freedom and democracy on D-Day."

"...One day, this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us all simply because we have a government too vain and inexperienced to restrain itself. That is why it is so important to dispel it."

"There is little doubt that much of the bombing of Germany was done to please and appease Josef Stalin. Stalin jeered at Churchill for his failure to open a Second Front and to fight Hitler’s armies in Europe, and ceaselessly pressed him to open such a front – something Churchill was politically and militarily reluctant to do. Bombing Germany, though it did not satisfy Stalin’s demands for an invasion, at least reassured him that we were doing something, and so lessened his pressure on us to open a second front.
Pleasing Stalin – or at least avoiding his disfavour – would be one of Winston Churchill’s preoccupations in the years that followed...
...the killing of German civilians, and the disruption of German rule in central Europe, was an effective and practicable way of soothing the Soviet monster’s rages...
...Soon after his first ill-tempered encounter with Stalin, Churchill was pressed by Harris for a commitment to a bombing offensive. Churchill responded that he was committed to bombing, partly because it would look bad to stop such a major part of Britain’s war effort, but he did not expect it to have decisive results in 1943 or bring the war to an end. But it was, Churchill said, ‘better than doing nothing’."

"March 1945. Tokyo hit by Operation Meetinghouse, the single most destructive bombing raid of this or any war. 16 square miles of central Tokyo annihilated, over 1 million made homeless, with an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths. (To put these figures into context, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima some months later killed 70,000, and the one dropped on Nagasaki killed 35,000.)"

"It is true that nobody could have known at the time that the National Socialist persecution of Jews would end in the extermination camps. Even Hitler had not yet conceived of them. Yet when undoubted evidence of these camps later reached the USA and Britain, these countries took no direct action to prevent the murder, to destroy railway tracks leading to the murder camps or to rescue those who remained trapped in Europe. The Bermuda Conference of April 1943 likewise rejected any plans to relax immigration quotas, either in the USA or in Palestine, or to take special measures to allow Europe’s remaining Jews to escape Hitler. Yet by then many credible reports strongly suggesting large-scale murder had reached the outside world."

"And what can we say about World War II’s final settlement, at Yalta? Viewed coldly, this cynical action, a sort of large-scale protection racket in which Stalin played the racketeer and the Western Allies his cowed victims, was a far more disgraceful episode of appeasement than anything even contemplated at Munich in 1938. This unheroic pact meant the handing over of millions of innocent and defenceless people to a cruel foreign conqueror. Some of them – such as the Cossacks – were disgracefully sent in locked railway cars into the custody of Stalin’s NKVD execution squads. They had good reason to fear for their lives, but their frantic pleas to remain in the West were ignored. No doubt the penetration of our establishment by sympathisers of the Communist empire prevented us for many years from admitting the revolting nature of the Soviet state. But perhaps our embarrassment about having had such people as valued allies also played its part in that reticence."

"I am not saying that Britain should have remained neutral throughout the European War that began in 1939. I am saying that we might have done better to follow the wise example of the USA, and wait until we and our allies were militarily and diplomatically ready before entering that conflict. I am suggesting that our diplomacy, especially after March 1939, allowed others to dictate and hasten the timing of that war in ways that did not suit us or our main ally, France.
Above all, I am not saying that the war against Hitler was unnecessary. At some point, for the good of Germany, Europe and the world, Hitler’s career had to be ended, probably by force, from within or without. Even if you do not believe that the internal affairs of other countries are the business of other countries, you may hope that repulsive regimes may be brought to an end. And sometimes the most effective way of doing so is inflicting foreign policy defeats on them, robbing them of prestige at home.
The startling thing is that, as matters turned out, Britain ended up playing a surprisingly small part in the overthrow of Hitler. It was not British troops who stormed Hitler’s bunker or planted their flag on the ruins of the Reichstag. It is still difficult to mention this, or to criticise aspects of our war effort. But it is so."

"...In their campaign to dominate the nation’s criminal economy, the Zetas had blazed a trail of violence through more than a dozen Mexican states, trafficking drugs, smuggling migrants, and kidnapping for ransom.
Two years earlier, in January 2014, the Zeta cell that the Florist belonged to had kidnapped Karen. Miriam had begged, pleaded, and paid ransoms she could not afford, following the Zetas’ every instruction. She got nothing in return, not even knowledge of what had happened to Karen.
Government authorities had dismissed her, ignoring her entreaties or meeting them with a practiced formality that barely masked their apathy. In that void, her grief gave way to acceptance, and then to resolve: to seek revenge and pursue justice herself, for Karen, and for the other families of the disappeared."

"Kennan went into Siberia twice. The first time was in 1865 when, as a member of a Western Union–backed venture called the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, he explored a route for a telegraph line through the subzero wilderness of northeastern Siberia. It was a classic young man’s adventure filled with challenges and hardships and driven by Kennan’s quest to prove his courage. Twenty years later he returned to Siberia with George Frost to investigate the exile system and found himself on a moral journey. By then he had become one of America’s most prominent defenders of Russia and its centuries-old practice of banishing criminals and political dissidents to Siberia. Kennan, who spoke Russian fluently and was regarded as a leading expert on Russia, believed that a thorough, objective investigation would vindicate his contention that the exile system, while hardly without flaws, was more humane than penal systems in European countries. He also hoped that his articles about the Siberian exile system would make him rich and famous."

"...Ghosts of convicted criminals haunted the clearing in the forest. In an earlier era, the convicts, bearded and gaunt after months of marching from European Russia, had been allowed by their guards a brief stop at the pillar.
Some kissed the European side of the pillar while others pressed their tearsoaked faces to it. Convicts collapsed to their knees and buried their faces in the earth. Some hugged each other or dug up handfuls of dirt to take with them. A few scraped their names or inscriptions on the pillar. “Farewell life!” The exile convoy commander shouted an order to form ranks. With a clinking of their chains and shackles, the convicts assembled, crossed themselves, and resumed their march to the east.
Of those who survived to reach their Siberian destinations, few managed to return to Mother Russia after their sentences ended, which is why convicts wept at the pillar. A few years before Kennan’s investigation, the Russian government had completed a railroad line that transported convicts across European Russia and over the Ural Mountains, apparently without stopping at the boundary pillar. But since the Russian rail network did not yet penetrate far into Siberia, the convicts still had to march thousands of miles from the railhead to Siberian prisons, mines, and factories. Like their predecessors at the boundary pillar, few saw their homes again..."

"The Siberian exile system was not planned to be loathsome and vile. For much of its existence, little planning went into it. The system was the product of imperial ambitions, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, and inadequate funding; Siberia’s vast size and harsh terrain and climate; and the extraordinary Russian capacity to inflict and endure suffering. Centuries of grotesque penal evolution had spawned disease-ridden prisons, exile parties driven like cattle, virtual enslavement, and lunacies like the punishment of the Bell of Uglich. Other countries have exiled their criminals, but none on the scale of the Russian exile system. Between the 1780s and 1860s, the British transported about one hundred and sixty thousand convicts to Australia. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the French overseas penal population was between five and six thousand.
Russia stands out because between 1801 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the tsarist regime exiled more than a million of its subjects to far flung destinations within its own vast borders, creating what has been called “an enormous prison without a roof.”
As Siberia’s vast natural resources became apparent, the regime began employing the penal code as a tool for supplying Siberia with a labor force because too few Russians would go voluntarily. The offenses punishable by Siberian exile grew to include not just common-law crimes but political offenses, religious dissent, army desertion, and vagrancy. In 1753, the death penalty was formally abolished, and instead of being hanged, capital offenders underwent a public mutilation followed by “eternal penal labour” in Siberia. The death penalty would reclaim a place in the Russian judicial system in the nineteenth century, most notably in cases involving assassination plots against tsars.
Abolition of the death penalty did more than free up laborers for Siberia. As historian Andrew A. Gentes points out, abolition emphasized the divine-like power of the ruling Romanovs to either execute their subjects or show them mercy:
'I could kill you, but I choose instead to spare you out of Christian mercy (milost). Therefore, although you have been flogged nearly to death and have had your face branded and your nose cut off, you should be grateful that you have been allowed to commence a two year, three thousand mile journey in chains for the purpose of sowing grain in His Majesty’s fields near the Arctic Circle.'"

"On his return to the United States in August 1886, he became an ardent critic of the Russian autocracy and began to espouse the cause of Russian democracy. Kennan devoted much of the next twenty years to promoting the cause of a Russian revolution, mainly by lecturing. Kennan was one of the most prolific lecturers of the late 19th century. He spoke before a million or so people during the 1890s, including two hundred consecutive evening appearances during 1890–91 (excepting Sundays) before crowds of as many as 2000 people. His reports on conditions in Siberia were published serially by Century Magazine, and in 1891, he published a two-volume book Siberia and The Exile System. It, with first-hand interviews, data, and drawings by the artist George Albert Frost, had an influential effect on American public opinion."

"...Breshkovsky’s powerful imagery of sacrifice and suffering at the hands of a brutal regime that was succeeded by an even more brutal regime created what one historian called a “sturdy narrative bridge” between the Siberian exile system and the gulag system under Stalin. After taking power, the communist regime began converting parts of the Siberian exile system’s infrastructure into what eventually became known as the Gulag Archipelago, a forced labor camp system whose scale and lethality far exceeded anything Kennan had witnessed in his 1885–86 investigation. In the mid-1930s, Stalin launched the Great Terror whose countless victims included more than a hundred members of the Russian Society of Former Political Penal Laborers, which had been formed by the now elderly revolutionaries who had fought to overthrow the tsar. They had survived hard labor in Siberia only to be executed by Stalin. Today, the Russian penal system and its nearly seven hundred penitentiaries have features that can be traced to the Siberian exile system. These include use of penal colonies with large inmate barracks, convict organizations that resemble the brutal artels that Kennan found in the tsarist-era Siberian exile parties and prisons, and the state’s use of the judicial and penal system to silence and punish its political opponents.
George Kennan grasped the nature of the new regime, unlike some of his fellow journalists. Lincoln Steffens, a prominent investigative reporter, after returning from a visit to the Soviet Union in 1919, famously proclaimed that “I have seen the future, and it works.” By contrast, when the communist government enacted a “constitution” for the newly formed USSR in 1923, Kennan observed that the constitution left power in a small group of self-appointed rulers without accountability to the Russian people, where it had always been since the Bolshevik takeover. With a hint of bitter realism, he warned, “But let no one be deceived. The Russian leopard has not changed its spots.”

"The evolutionary history of the human species is far from being a conveniently linear ‘March to Progress’. As we saw in the last chapter, it is hard enough with related living species to work out where one ends and the other begins. The task of working out our own lineage when all we have to go on is fossils is made much harder. The early Homo habilis may have been a separate species or one and the same as Homo erectus. Furthermore, it looks like Homo sapiens has been around for a very long time, although not sequentially but simultaneously with other Homo species. Which raises the interesting and potentially knotty problem of what happened when humans met Neanderthals?"

"...By 2010, increasing numbers of Americans were beginning to express fears that they were losing the country they grew up in, and that they had hoped—or perhaps too complacently assumed—that they would be passing on to their children and grandchildren.
No one issue and no one administration in Washington has been enough to create a perfect storm for a great nation that has weathered many storms in its more than two centuries of existence. But the Roman Empire lasted many times longer, and weathered many storms in its turbulent times—and yet it ultimately collapsed completely.
It has been estimated that a thousand years passed before the standard of living in Europe rose again to the level it had achieved in Roman times. The collapse of a civilization is not just the replacement of rulers or institutions with new rulers and new institutions. It is the destruction of a whole way of life and the painful, and sometimes pathetic, attempts to begin rebuilding amid the ruins.
Is that where America is headed? I believe it is. Our only saving grace is that we are not there yet—and that nothing is inevitable until it happens."

"When we look back at the decades-long erosions and distortions of our educational system, our legal system and our political system, we must acknowledge the chilling fact that the kinds of dangers we face now were always inherent in these degenerating trends. The essays that follow deal with these trends individually, but it may help to keep in mind that they were all going on at the same time, and that these are the dangers whose coming together can create a perfect storm."

"...My Bosniak driver believed the ethnic conflict in his country was horrific and exceptional, but he was only partly right: it was horrific—but utterly unexceptional. Collectively, ethnic conflicts around the world, from Bosnia to Sri Lanka, have killed more than ten million people since World War II.
Many Americans reflexively tune out news of these conflicts. In the words of one satirist, it’s just the “unspellables” killing the “unpronounceables”—peoples too distant or inexplicable to pay attention to. But as Americans, we need to pay attention, not just for the sake of the millions around the world suffering from ethnic division, but for our own sake. We must deepen our understanding of what it takes for diverse ethnic groups to get along and share a country, for America is rapidly becoming vastly more multiethnic..."

"...Thus, as the United States has veered from melting pot to multiculturalism, there has been little serious discussion about how similar course changes have worked out in other countries. The reality is that both the melting pot and multiculturalist models have been tried many times in history. In some cases, societies have shifted from one to the other. It’s worth examining how it has worked out for them; perhaps we can distill some useful lessons from their experiences. That is what this book endeavors to accomplish."

"After considering the terrible consequences of ethnic divisions in countries like Bosnia and Sri Lanka, it is disheartening to see Americans advance the same types of policies and rhetoric that promoted and toxified those divisions. America has a regrettable past of racial and ethnic discrimination, but if the examples in this book teach anything, it is that the solution to past segregation is not even more segregation. The answer to past racial discrimination is not even more racial discrimination. Two African countries demonstrate this best.
While it was a British protectorate, Botswana endured extensive white racism. Yet it managed to recover quickly to become one of the developing world’s outstanding success stories. It achieved this not with compensatory preferences and racial payback but by completely eliminating racial and ethnic distinctions and by fostering botho, the Batswana version of asabiyah. It also followed the melting pot model, which has repeatedly demonstrated its effectiveness since the time of ancient Rome.
In proportional terms, Rwanda’s genocide stands out as one of the worst racist crimes of all time. Although the genocide occurred only a few decades ago, Rwanda has managed to recover spectacularly from it. Like Botswana, Rwanda accomplished this by “erasing race” and adopting the melting pot model. Rather than instituting ethnic preferences like affirmative action, it outlawed racial and ethnic distinctions altogether. Rather than dividing people into groups, it has sought to unify them with institutions like umuganda. Rather than brooding on past injustices, it has cultivated the shared asabiyah lauded by Ibn Khaldun.
The path taken by Botswana and Rwanda lies open to America. It starts with resolute and unwavering commitments to principles like those made by Israel Zangwill in The Melting Pot and by the children in Rwanda’s Nyange school:
There are no groups. We are all Americans."

"...That’s not to say we don’t lie; indeed, multiple studies have found that lying is an inherent part of human nature, and who hasn’t told a white lie to protect feelings or get out of a spot of trouble? Still, we continue to tell our children not to lie, and for good reason. Even when we put aside morals and ethics and just focus on the practicality of the thing, lying is more often than not a damaging practice that tends to spiral out of control, creating chasms and domino effects that are impossible to reverse. If this is the effect that lying can have on our individual lives, then you can imagine the immense impact it’s had on history."

"Over the next fifty chapters, we’ll traverse some of the darkest events in human history. At times it can feel inescapably bleak, but in that mire of lies there is always light. Because, when we peel back the lies of history, we can gain a better understanding of not only history itself but the legacies of the past we’re left with today. This isn’t so much a book about uncovering the truth, as it is one of untangling the web of deceit that hid it and looking at why that web was there in the first place."

"...When the Devil’s Highway was a faint scratch of desert bighorn hoof marks, and the first hunters ran along it, someone died. But the brown and red men who ran the paths left no record outside of faded songs and rock paintings we still don’t understand.
Desert spirits of a dark and mysterious nature have always traveled these trails. From the beginning, the highway has always lacked grace— those who worship desert gods know them to favor retribution over the tender dove of forgiveness. In Desolation, doves are at the bottom of the food chain. Tohono O’Odham poet Ofelia Zepeda has pointed out that rosaries and Hail Marys don’t work out here. “You need a new kind of prayers,” she says, “to negotiate with this land.”

"This account was based on many sources. Interviews and travel, of course, provided many insights and testimonies. I was granted unusually generous access to documents and governmental reports from both Mexico and the United States; these were central to the collection of stories. Border Patrol reports, sheriff’s department reports, Mexican consular reports, Justice Department reports, legal documents, testimonies and trial documents, correspondence, and many hours of taped interrogations and confessions went into the research. Due to concerns about the personal safety of the survivors, their actual depositions were sealed.
I spent hours in federal defenders’ offices, in various consulates, in Border Patrol stations, with Samaritan groups, in diners over cups of coffee, in Migra trucks, and on the Devil’s Highway itself. At the time of this investigation, the survivors were material witnesses in a criminal case, and were also clients in the notorious civil suit against the United States; because of this, they were shielded from direct contact with me. The hours of their torment, however, were well documented, often in their own words. And the Mexican officials who handle their cases were forthcoming with information, sometimes offered surreptitiously, off the record, or representing messages the survivors wanted heard. Some of the sources for this book did not choose to be—or could not be— quoted directly.
The year I spent researching and traveling consumed four leather-bound notebooks of about 144 pages each. Much of that material, of course, was tangential. Still, about half of each notebook went into this book. Certain passages, nevertheless, were subject to educated conjecture. For example, no number of letters to Jesús Antonio Lopez Ramos, aka Mendez, will ever be answered. He simply won’t answer questions, largely to protect his loved ones from payback by the Coyote gang. Fortunately, his testimony and writings and taped pensées are available for study."

"However long it takes you to die, you will pass through six known stages of heat death, or hyperthermia, and they are the same for everyone. It doesn’t matter what language you speak, or what color your skin. Whether you speed through these stages, or linger at each, hyperthermia will express itself in six ways.
The stages are: Heat Stress, Heat Fatigue, Heat Syncope, Heat Cramps, Heat Exhaustion, and Heat Stroke.
The people most at risk from hyperthermia are the elderly. That’s why Midwestern heat waves feature dead Chicago retirees by the score. But the wicked genius of Desolation is that it makes even the young old so that it can kill them more easily."