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“A painstaking, unsentimental and oddly lyrical chronology of the traveling party’s horrific trek through the Sonora.”
— Washington Post
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“Superb…Nothing less than a saga on the scale of the Exodus and an ordeal as heartbreaking as the Passion.”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
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“What is the real story of undocumented immigration from our southern neighbor?…In his acclaimed 2004 account The Devil’s Highway, he puts this story into human terms.”
— Huffington Post
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“The research here is excellent, and Urrea's narration is impressive.
The story unfolds in a way that is fascinating to the listener—you can
almost feel the heat and smell the desperation.”
— Library Journal (audio review)
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“[This book] may not directly influence the forces behind the US's southern
border travesties, but it does give names and identities to the faceless
and maligned ‘wetbacks’ and ‘pollos,’ and highlights the brutality and
unsustainable nature of the many walls separating the two countries.”
— Publishers Weekly
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“A powerful, almost diabolical impression of the disaster and the
exploitative conditions at the border. Urrea shows immigration policy on
the human level.”
— Booklist
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“A horrendous story told with bitter skill, highlighting the whole sordid, greedy mess that attends illegal broader crossings.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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“His reading of his own work offers all the advantages of author narration—perfect pronunciation and emphasis—with none of the disadvantages. He obviously enjoys the idioms of the border.”
— AudioFile
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The single most compelling, lucid, and lyrical contemporary account of the absurdity of U.S. border policy.
— The Atlantic
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It makes what currently passes for our public debate over illegal immigration seem appallingly abstract and tin-eared. The Devil's Highway isn't just a great book, it's a necessary one.
— Jeff Salamon, Austin American-Statesman
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Urrea's writing is wickedly good--outrage tempered with concern channeled into deft prose.
— Kathleen Johnson, Kansas City Star
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Urrea writes about U.S.-Mexican border culture with a tragic and beautiful intimacy that has no equal.
— Tom Montgomery Fate, Boston Globe
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One of the great surrealistic tragedies of the global age...Urrea has crafted an impassioned and poetic exploration of the dark side of globalization, where commodities flow free and people die in the desert.
— Jefferson Cowie, Chicago Tribune
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In artful yet uncomplicated prose, Urrea captivatingly tells how a dozen men squeezed by to safety...Confident and full of righteous rage, Urrea's story is a well-crafted melange of first-person testimony, geographic history, cultural and economic analysis, poetry and an indictment of immigration policy.
— Publishers Weekly
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A powerful, almost diabolical impression of the disaster and the exploitative conditions of the border. Urrea shows immigration policy on the human level.
— Booklist