Bandit Roads: Into the Lawless Heart of Mexico (The Hungry Student) - Hardcover

Grant, Richard

3.83

194 ratings by Goodreads

9780316729369: Bandit Roads: Into the Lawless Heart of Mexico (The Hungry Student)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316729361 ISBN 13: 9780316729369

Publisher: Little, Brown, 2008

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There are many ways to die in the Sierra Madre, a notorious nine-hundred-mile mountain range in northern Mexico where AK-47s are fetish objects, the law is almost non-existent and power lies in the hands of brutal drug mafias. Thousands of tons of opium and marijuana are produced there every year. Richard Grant thought it would be a good idea to travel the length of the Sierra Madre and write a book about it.

He was warned before he left that he would be killed. But driven by what he calls 'an unfortunate fascination' for this mysterious region, Grant sets off anyway. In a remarkable piece of investigative writing, he evokes a sinister, surreal landscape of lonely mesas, canyons sometimes deeper than the Grand Canyon, hostile villages and an outlaw culture where homicide is the most common cause of death and grandmothers sell cocaine. Finally his luck runs out and he finds himself fleeing for his life, pursued by men who would murder a stranger in their territory 'to please the trigger finger'.

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Review:

Erudite & street-smart... that rare thing: a travel writer who not only amuses & informs but also reappraises a well trodden landscape with brio & originality (MAIL ON SUNDAY)

[Grant] brings to light a range of darkly romantic wanderers who strayed from the American mainstream while exemplifying the American Dream (OBSERVER)

....the freshest travel book on the US in a long time & one of the best short entrees to its history & culture (TLS)

His yarn rips along to a staccato sound-track of gunfire and inventive obscenities from some of the most unrighteous examples of humanity alive' Peter Carty, INDEPENDENT ('A raw, colourful tour through the Sierra Madre . . . he is a cracking travel writer, and his book brims with revealing conversations, escapades and history')

Book Description:

* A tale of high adventure in Mexico's bandit country

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