Don Winslow's "The Border"

Winslow's new novel The Border picks up the storyline from The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, carrying the reader through the whole War on Drugs in a well-researched and well-imagined fashion.  This is high level novel-writing in the best sense, by which I mean that Winslow creates compelling characters even as he presents very deeply researched truths about human actions and societal developments that speak to the worst and best of humanity, often the worst.  Still, reading The Border has made me wanting to be better, to act better, to speak better about what needs to be said, and to vote better, for voting and holding our elected representives accountable is at the heart of this novel.

Byronic Opposition

Byron's expressions of the heroic saliently focused on opposition figures--the Trojan view, Priam's sons, a Turkish infidel and his sons, a cripple--to express that heroism, a thought I'd misplaced from back in the days I was working on that dissertation.

(How odd, especially given that my intended and partially-unexamined title read "With a Trojan's Eye."  I knew Byron was more cosmopolitan, more liberal, of mind and heart than many have given him credit for, but I wasn't quite digesting all that I'd been consuming, reading hugely as I was, and so . . . .)