Crossers: A Novel [Audiobook, CD, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Philip Caputo (Author), Paul Boehmer (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 2009

<DIV>From the acclaimed author of Acts of Faith comes a blistering new novel about the brutality and beauty of life on the Arizona-Mexico border and about the unyielding power of the past to shape our lives.</div>

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A Q&A with Philip Caputo

Question: Was there a particular idea or event that was the genesis of this novel?

Philip Caputo: In 2006 I’d started doing research and interviews for a nonfiction piece about border issues for the Virginia Quarterly Review. In the course of that work, I’d stumbled on historical material and was fascinated to learn that what we think of as contemporary problems on the Mexican border--illegal immigration, smuggling, violence--go back at least a hundred years. I was also struck by the similarities between the Mexican drug cartels and today’s Islamist terrorists. The former are motivated by greed, the latter by religious and political fanaticism, but they are alike in the atrocities they commit, in their utter lack of compassion and conscience. The stories illegal immigrants told me about their sufferings moved me as well. One of those tales involved a man who was abandoned by his coyote (as immigrant smugglers are called), got lost in the mountains, and nearly died before he was rescued by a rancher I know. Moral conflict and moral ambiguity are themes that have consumed me throughout my career, and there is plenty of both on the border. All of this seemed a rich vein for a novel. I never experienced a "eureka" moment, but various experiences and impressions began to flow together, like tributary streams into a river, and I started writing.

Question: You spend several months of the year living in Arizona, very close to the Mexican border. How long have you been doing that and what first drew you to Arizona?

Philip Caputo: My wife and I started to spend time in Arizona in 1996 at the urging of good friends who live there. Our part of the state, in the southeast, is a kind of the anti-Phoenix--hundreds of thousands of acres of high desert plateaus and mountains, most of them public land. Room to roam, a certain stark beauty. The San Rafael valley, which is near the little town where we own an old adobe house, is gorgeous. I hunt desert quail there behind a pair of English setters, and those days bring me great joy. Leslie and I ride the valley quite a lot on horseback when I’m not hunting. Ranging through those wide-open spaces on foot or in the saddle is the essence of freedom.

Question: What kind of research did you need to do--into the history of the border but also on such things as cattle ranching, drug smuggling, etc.?

Philip Caputo: I did a lot in historical society archives, sifting through old newspaper stories and personal accounts. A good friend who is a Border Patrol agent gave me tutorials in the drug trade. I accompanied him on two undercover assignments in Mexico and on a few missions on this side of the border. Three other friends are cowboys or cattlemen, whom I joined on roundups and brandings and other ranch work. I learned quite a bit from them, and a had a great deal of fun doing it.

Question: How did you decide to structure this novel as a multi-generational story, incorporating family history and oral transcripts?

Philip Caputo: Originally, I intended to write two novels. The first was going to be set in the past, from 1903 to 1951, and was going to be titled A Dangerous Man. The second was going to take place in the present and pick up the stories of the historical characters’ descendants. I was well into the first book when it came to me that this was the wrong approach. Somehow, one tale set in yesterday and another in today lost power standing alone. So I decided to fuse the two. At first, the historical story was going to be part one, the contemporary story was going to be part two; but that seemed too linear, too mechanical and schematic. It also violated the spirit of the book--I wanted to show that the past is never dead, that it constantly affects the present, rather like the gravitational field of one heavenly body affecting the orbit of another. It would be better to tell both stories in alternating chapters. Well, that proved very difficult. Then, I had one of those moments that makes writing such an adventure. One day, a voice started to speak in my head, the voice of an old Arizona cowboy, T.J. Babcock, relating his adventures in the Mexican Revolution--an oral history. T.J. led me to the solution to the length problem. By framing the historical narrative as a series of oral histories, I could tell a story spanning half a century in a relatively brief fashion.

Question: One of your characters describes the U.S. border efforts as "Star Wars joining hands with the Old West, two myths linked by the gringo faith in technology to overcome..." Pretty strong words. Accurate?

Philip Caputo: I think so. We conquered this vast continent with repeating rifles and railroads, the hi-tech of their day. Americans love, they practically worship gadgets and gizmos. That line my character speaks arose from a night I spent in a Border Patrol station in Naco, Arizona. TV screens linked to cameras mounted on towers in the desert covered one entire wall. Agents manipulated the cameras with joysticks and communicated with field agents by radio. On one screen, I saw a group of illegal aliens creeping through the brush, while the operator talked to Border Patrolmen wearing cowboys hats and night-vision goggles as they rode horseback. Pretty soon, directed by the operator from miles away, the mounted agents galloped onto the screen and captured the intruders. The fusion of all that electronic technology with that image, which looked like a scene from a western, was mind-blowing.

(Photo © Mason Rose)

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The fallout between public and private distinctions of war is just one of the border disputes haunting Pulitzer-winner Caputo's gorgeously stark latest. Inconsolable after the loss of his wife on 9/11, Gil Castle leaves New York for his family's Arizona ranch, San Ignacio, overlooking the Mexican border. But San Ignacio proves to be a pretty place where some ugly things happen, and Gil's discovery of a Mexican illegal, left for dead after a border-crossing deal gone awry, soon merges the world of cattle and horses and operatic landscapes with the world of drug lords and coyotes and murder, whose cast of femmes fatale and tough muchachos includes the Professor—an agent of history working both sides of the border and at least two sides of the law—and Yvonne Menéndez, the ruthless leader of the Agua Prieta cartel, whose past may be painfully entwined with Gil's family history. That history is broadly personified in Gil's larger-than-life grandfather Ben Erskine, a legendary deputy sheriff whose adventures emerge in inter-chapter accounts. At first glance, this multifarious book skirts country familiar to readers of McCarthy or McMurtry, but Caputo's west supersedes elemental cowboys and lone justice with the malaise of post-9/11 America and the violence of the Mexican desert—as gruesome as in Iraq—frothing with moral ambiguity and fraught with complicity. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Tantor Media; Unabridged CD Library Binding edition (November 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400144264
• ISBN-13: 978-1400144266
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 7.1 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Novelist and journalist Philip Caputo (1941 -- ) was born in Chicago and educated at Purdue and Loyola Universities. After graduating in 1964, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps for three years, including a 16-month tour of duty in Vietnam. He has written 14 books, including two memoirs, four books of general nonfiction, and eight novels. His acclaimed memoir of Vietnam, A Rumor of War, has been published in 15 languages, has sold over 1.5 million copies since its publication in 1977, and is widely regarded as a classic in the literature of war. His 2005 novel "Acts of Faith," a story about war, love, and the betrayal of ideals set in war-torn Sudan is considered his masterpiece in fiction, and has sold 102,000 copies to date, His most recent novel, Crossers, set against a backdrop of drug and illegal-immigrant smuggling on the Mexican border,was published in hardcover in 2009 by Alfred A. Knopf and in paperback by Vintage in 2010. He is now working on a travel book, "The Longest Road: From the Southern Cross to the Northern Lights." It describes an epic road trip from the southernmost point in the U.S., Key West, Floirida, to the northernmost that can be reached by road, Deadhorse Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean. The journey took 4 months and covered 17,000 miles. Though it bears his unique stamp, the narrative fuses elements of John Steinbeck, Jack Keruoac, William Least Moon, and Charles Kuralt. Caputo interviewed more than 80 Americans from all walks of life to get a picture of what their lives and the life of the nation are like in the 21st century. He expects to finish in June of the year. Henry Holt will publish the book in May, 2013.

In addition to books, Caputo has published dozens of major magazine articles, reviews, and op-ed pieces in publications ranging from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post to Esquire, National Geographic, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Topics included profiles of novelist William Styron and actor Robert Redford, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the turmoil on the Mexican border.

Caputo's professional writing career began in 1968, when he joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune, serving as a general assignment and team investigative reporter until 1972. For the next five years, he was a foreign correspondent for that newspaper, stationed in Rome, Beirut, Saigon, and Moscow. In 1977, he left the paper to devote himself to writing books and magazine articles.


Caputo has won 10 journalistic and literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 (shared for team investigative reporting on vote fraud in Chicago), the Overseas Press Club Award in 1973, the Sidney Hillman Foundation award in 1977 (for A Rumor of War), the Connecticut Book Award in 2006, and the Literary Lights Award in 2007. His first novel, Horn of Africa, was a National Book Award finalist in 1980, and his 2007 essay on illegal immigration won the Blackford Prize for nonfiction from the University of Virginia.

He and his wife, Leslie Ware, an editor for Consumer Reports magazine, divide their time between Connecticut and Arizona. Caputo has two sons from a previous marriage, Geoffrey, a jazz composer and music teacher, and Marc, a political reporter for the Miami Herald.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Border Epic, October 25, 2009

By 

C. Wallace (L.A.) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Crossers (Hardcover)

This book moved back and forth between two stories, much as several of its characters cross back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico. The primary story is that of Gil Castle, a highly successful Wall Street financial analyst (net worth: "low eight figures") whose wife was on the plane that smashed into the north tower on 9/11. In an attempt to recover from the grief that paralyzed him for two years after this disaster, he moves to his cousin's huge Arizona cattle ranch, which is right on the Mexican border.

Life on the ranch offers many diversions, including a heated romance, but some of the diversions are less than idyllic. Drug smugglers and people smugglers (coyotes) use the ranch as an entrepôt to the U.S. Castle finds himself in the middle, literally.

The other story is that of Ben Erskine, Castle's grandfather, and the grandfather of Blaine Erskine, the ranch owner. Through flashbacks, Ben's life unfolds from 1903-1951. Ben was a violent man, with a boiling temper. He worked on both sides of the law, once serving as a county sheriff. He played a role in the violence that characterized revolutionary Mexico in the early twentieth century. His grandson, Blaine, also has a very short fuse.

I thought the first two thirds (total: 448 pages) dragged more than just a bit. I felt little empathy for Gil Castle and found his transformation from Wall Street rich guy to Arizona pistol-packing cowboy improbable. But it does pick up and builds to a spellbinding conclusion, which earns five stars. Veteran author Philip Caputo brings great insight into the human condition to this work. He develops fascinating portrayals of such characters as Yvonne Menéndez, vicious, vengeful drug queen, and The Professor, a cunning operative with a bizarre distortion of sight and smell.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Issues along our southern border, November 22, 2009

By 

Cherie M. Mcginn (Las Cruces, NM) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Crossers (Hardcover)

My husband and I retired to southern New Mexico three years ago from the east coast. While on the east coast I told many of my friends that I intended to join a group that provided water for illegal immigrants crossing the border into NM. Seeing and reading about the problems caused by the "crossers" forced me to have second thoughts. Caputo's book finalized my concerns. He does an absolutely excellent job of presenting the multiple sides of the issue of crossers. A couple of characters sympathize with the illegal immigrants for all the reasons humanity presents: life is better here; they do the jobs no one else wants to do; the Statue of Liberty; etc. The characters who oppose illegal immigration are portrayed in many ways: those who just don't like immigrants; those who think there should be a "Great Wall" to keep them out; those who are concerned about the danger of the illegal crossings, etc. Caputo also extensively addresses the issue of the drug cartels and the mayhem and danger they have added to the issues. Where Caputo does an outstanding job is to bring all of these stories together, and to throw in some historical background with characters who originally worked and owned the land during the Mexican Revolution. Unless you live along the Borderlands you likely do not have a full picture of what is going on here -- newspapers on the east coast (and probably most of the US) tell isolated stories, some heart-wrenching, and some seriously overblown. Caputo, through his characters, presents an accurate view of the issues, forces the reader to consider good and bad aspects of the illegal crossings, and demonstrates how quickly things can turn bad even with the best of intentions. Folks -- the fence won't solve anything -- read this book, talk to your friends and contact your congressmen -- we need a better policy. Urge policy-makers to read this book.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrifically entertaining, November 3, 2009

By 

AZ snowbird - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crossers (Hardcover)

Crossers combines history, adventure, and romance with a message about how

the past haunts the present. Caputo skillfully interweaves Old West tales of

mysterious renegade lawman Ben Erskine with the story of Ben's descendants,

including Gil Castle, who tries to escape the pain of losing his wife in the

9/11 attacks by crossing from East to West, specifically to the family's

ranch on the Arizona-Mexico border. There, he confronts a different kind of

violence, as he copes with modern-day outlaws trafficking in drugs and human

cargo--migrants crossing from south to north to make a new life. The

characters really come to life, especially the unique Yvonne, a drug

queenpin with major attitude, and The Professor, who works both sides of the

border and the law. A richly rewarding read.