7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Winning the Battles on Drugs, Not Affecting the War, July 27, 2005
This review is from: A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior (Hardcover)
One definition of insanity is that a person keeps doing the same thing over and over even after he knows that it won't work. I have met people like Joey O'Shay who have such a deep seated drive to wipe out the drug business that they almost couldn't function doing anything else. Popeye Doyle of French Connection fame was one.
I've also seen them reach the point where perhaps they have been shot a time or two, perhaps they have looked at all the drugs that the French Connection stopped from comming into the country ($32,000,000) doesn't mean that drugs are any harder to get. (In fact police tell me that the drugs on the street are of higher quality and lower price than ever before.) Then like Joey O'Shay they begin to question the futility of our never ending war on drugs. And somewhere along there Mr. O'Shay you'd better find a way to leave this life behind.
I do not profess to know the answer to the drug problem, but, Guys, this isn't working.
As you might guess, in this book Joey O'Shay is a cop on the undercover drug beat. He's being very successful, but the people he puts away are replaced immediately. He's involved with another huge drug deal. He's having a problem understanding that winning the battles he is fighting isn't winning the war.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Supply and demand, June 23, 2005
This review is from: A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior (Hardcover)
"The city does not sleep at this hour...the streets belong to the feral, to predators coursing its arteries for prey". Joey O'Shay is agent for the DEA, deep undercover, his home for the last twenty years the dark streets, the shadowed alleys, where drugs are for sale and life is cheap. His network of agents and informants bring the players close. O'Shay takes them in and odes the deal.
The drug trade is nothing if not cynical and Joey has been too long behind the scenes, making deals and dodging death, caught up in a web of deceit that he manipulates so skillfully, he has thus far avoided the bullet with his name on it. But the agent is weary, grown used to the game, but with no way out. So he continues setting up the deals, meeting with the Mexicans and the Colombians, pushing the tons of cocaine, marijuana and heroin for the insatiable appetites of addicts.
This is a world of ambiguities, where contradictions abound, where day is night and the player's sleep with evil. This book enters a world beyond the senses, revealing the titillating details of drug trafficking, the connections, the cold business of exchanging money for product. Joey O'Shay is the doer, the man behind the scenes, building an almost impenetrable web of associations. O'Shay lives his obsession, always planning, always in the deal, a long time survivor who is reaching some kind of crisis, inhabiting this cold life for too long.
His career started with breaking in doors and busting small-time dealers, but has progressed, along with his skills, to include the big Colombians who move enormous quantities of product. These are the deals that please the bureaucrats of the DEA and their bosses in Washington, the phone calls that can be traced to map out an entire network. And O'Shay is never there for the take-down; he moves on to the next deal. To break the spell of this world and make it more livable, the agent paints, listens to music late at night and reads a holocaust survivor's account of the death camps ("Man's Search for Meaning"), identifying with the author's feelings.
Edgy and brutal, O'Shay's stream-of-consciousness hops from past to present, tossing bits of information against the wall like a Jackson Pollock painting. He is surrounded by a cast of shadowy characters: Cosima, his best confidential informant; Alvarez, a man ready to make a deal to save his own life after losing other people`s money; Bobbie, part of the straight world, but drawn to the darker one, close enough to O'Shay to read his state of mind; and Gloria, Cosima's friend and South American connection, who makes the mistake of trusting O'Shay's soft words and pays for it with her freedom.
This book is a psychological investigation of one man's life as he goes about increasingly difficult undercover work for the DEA, but the real toll is on his mind, the cost of business eating away at his sense of himself: "It is the self-questioning and needing to know ore about the meaning of life...that frightens me. Almost a fear that when I stop pursuing them... I must pursue who I really am or what I became." O'Shay is a very smooth thug and a killer, but he works for the good guys, although now he identifies more with the dealers he sets up. He stays in a life that rots the soul, as jaded as a hardened criminal, unconnected and untouched by humanity because it is too dangerous. He is the Shadow in the City, but it's also the specter of death that haunts his every move. He has become a creature of the streets and it is that private hell that he shares with the author, against a backdrop of other agents and CI's, a lonely figure trying to work his way back to himself. It is the price he pays for this job. Luan Gaines/2005.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In Dubious Battle, August 2, 2005
This review is from: A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior (Hardcover)
In January of 1935, shortly before Steinbeck sent off his manuscript of "In Dubious Battle," he wrote, "But man hates something in himself. He has been able to defeat every natural obstacle but himself he cannot win over unless he kills every individual. And this self-hate which goes so closely in hand with self-love is what I wrote about. This books is brutal. I wanted to be merely a recording consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing. I think it has the thrust, almost crazy, that mobs have." What does this have to do with Bowden's latest book? Everything and nothing.
He is a poet trapped in a journalist's psyche, and this is no more evident than the opening of this book. I think the same could be said of Steinbeck who approached the world scientifically through metaphor. I would have enjoyed this, a conversation amongst Bowden, Abbey, Ricketts, Steinbeck, hell, throw in Joe Campbell.
Buy this book and learn about the animal within us all. An animal that purrs while ripping the flesh of a gazelle.
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