Smokescreen: A True Adventure

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		Smokescreen: A True Adventure
		Smokescreen: A True Adventure

基本信息·出版社：Canongate Books Ltd
·页码：320 页
·出版日期：2002年02月
·ISBN：184195232X
·条形码：9781841952321
·装帧：精装
·正文语种：英语

内容简介 'Do you think you have the balls it would take to risk your life for a million dollars?' Allen Long certainly did. Balls like a bull elephant's - with charisma and cunning in the same large measure. But he needed to know that those around him could handle pressure. After all, they'd be violating Colombian and US airspace in a dilapidated DC-3 and landing on jungle mud tracks in bandit country. They'd have to avoid detection by America's most tooled-up law enforcement agencies and remain wired and vigilant at all times. They'd be pioneering dope smugglers - doing it with aplomb and panache like no one else. Their leader, the irrepressible Long, was only interested in the very best which for him was Colombian Gold. He was responsible for upping the quality and quantity of weed being smoked in North America in the 70s and he did so in the most outrageous and remarkable fashion. From the writer of the drug smuggling classic Snowblind, comes a true story more hair-raising, high-octane and heart-pounding than any fictional adventure thriller. Take a seat. And hang on for the ride of his life.
作者简介 Robert Sabbag is the best-selling author of the drug smuggling classics Snowblind and Smokescreen, and the definitive book on the U.S. Marshals, Too Tough to Die. His journalism appears in numerous magazines, among them Rolling Stone, to which he is a regular contributor. Witness Protection, based on his New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Invisible Family", was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards, including Best Picture.
编辑推荐 Amazon.com Review
This is a story from the long-ago days of Colombian marijuana smuggling--long ago, because most of the pot now smoked in the United States is grown domestically, and the top narcotics import from Colombia is cocaine. Author Robert Sabbag tells the tale of Allen Long, who got involved in this unsavory business in the 1970s because he wanted to provide high-quality cannabis for his buddies and also for the sheer adventure of it. Some readers will find Long a disconcerting protagonist--he's a drug smuggler, after all--though it may appeal to advocates of drug legalization and readers of High Times. Sabbag essentially romanticizes Long's activities, such as when he writes about the "rather consoling absence of gunplay" that marked the business of marijuana smuggling in its primitive past. The storytelling is adequate, but parts of Loaded are plainly padded. Here's a bit of sample dialogue: "This is really great pot." "You like that?" "I don't think I've ever smoked anything better." A better and more hardheaded book on Colombian drug smuggling is Mark Bowden's Killing Pablo. --John Miller --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
When Sabbag's Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade came out in 1998, cultural icons like Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Stone, Norman Mailer and Nora Ephron hailed it as a classic study of America's drug obsession; their endorsements helped it achieve both cult status and commercial success. Sabbag's latest, despite its strong narrative drive and flashy, occasionally psychedelic writing style, probably won't elicit the same response. For one thing, Sabbag's hero this time is no Zachary Swann, Snowblind's larger-than-life coke dealer: Allen Long is a would-be filmmaker, a child of middle-class respectability from Richmond, Va., who "was born the year Harry S. Truman was elected to the American presidency, and was first arrested for marijuana possession the year Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde." For another, marijuana trafficking lacks the inherent drama of the cocaine trade. But most of all, there's the problem of historic distance, which Sabbag's writing fails to overcome. "The book presents a story from out of a time and place fogged in not only by the passage of years, but by an atmospheric shift in the political and cultural spirit of a generation," Sabbag writes in his acknowledgments. Add to that unfortunate lines such as "Like that of almost any man whose Christian name is a definite article, [dealer] El Coyote's image was simply that nobody really bought it," and readers are left with what feels like a message in a bottle from a place they left behind long ago. (Jan.)Forecast: With press junkets planned for the author and Long and a first serial excerpt going to Rolling Stone, this chronicle of crime and ingenuity should generate early hype. It's hard to imagine another round of blessings from the hip elite, though, for this rather disappointing follow-up to Sabbag's earlier success.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Sabbag (Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade) profiles dreamer-turned- drug smuggler Allen Long, who made a fortune running marijuana from Colombia to the United States in a refurbished plane during the early Seventies. Flying high in more ways than one, Long had more money than he thought possible and admittance to the best clubs in New York not to mention introductions to interesting and dangerous characters. Sabbag details Long's life as a smuggler, from making the initial contacts with the Colombians to flying the cargo back to the United States in a DC-3 with the lights out, high on marijuana, cocaine, and Heineken beer. Ah, the good life. But what started out as an adventure and a way to earn money "he was doing it for the money, yes" turned into a deadly business. Long finally realized that he had to draw the line in his involvement with drug smuggling. A sensational inside view of how the drug trade, particularly marijuana, started in this country and grew to epidemic proportions; recommended for large academic and public libraries. [Eventually indicted, Long served part of a five-year sentence and now works in the music business. Ed.] Karen Evans, Indiana State Univ., Terre Haut.
- Karen Evans, Indiana State Univ., Terre Haute
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
In some ways, Allen Long's life followed the stereotypical arc of the baby boomer. Born into the upper middle class, Long rebelled, did a lot of drugs, joined a band, had a lot of sex, and then grew up and became a responsible adult. But Long's life is the stuff of first-rate nonfiction because he didn't just do a lot of drugs; he also smuggled them. In the 1970s, Long smuggled nine million pounds of marijuana into the U.S., first from Mexico and later from Colombia. His life would be the stuff of great fiction, with gun-toting Colombian drug lords, daring evasions of law enforcement, a voracious cocaine habit, and a white-knuckler of a plane crash. Sabbag writes with the biting prose of a young Hunter S. Thompson and the dark, ironic wit of Nick Tosches. Some might quibble with his choice to spend 300 pages on Long's decade as a smuggler and three paragraphs on the three years he spent in federal prison, but the fast-paced adventure is pure fun. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
Described as 'A True Adventure', this is one of the most amazing stories about drugs and their shipment that I have ever read in either fiction or non fiction (this is, in fact, the latter). It starts off with Allen Long and others in a DC3 flying in to Colombia to pick up a huge cache of marijuana. They are warned not to land - rain has turned the primitive runway into a sea of mud - but they do. After loading the plane they crash through trees and have to land. The book is a series of incredible tales of success and failure with a somewhat grim epilogue which tells what happened to the main characters. I gather Canongate outbid other major publishers for this title, and it is a truly remarkable tale - indeed it makes a cracking read.

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