God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre

To paraphrase one part of the story: the Sierra Madre / Sonora / Chihuahua / Durango / Sinaloa / Mexico is the refuse dump of all of New Spain.

This book started off really good, but then it quickly settled in to essentially the same oft repeated theme every paragraph to every sentence. My interest became dulled to the point of really having to work to finish it.

The writing was good, and occasionally appealing. Like this part below:

"Témoris was a grubby, placid, little town with chickens scratching in the front yards, coffee-can flower gardens, and dogs sleeping under rusty old pickup trucks, saving their energy for all the barking they would have to do at night."

But I got tired of the repetitive narrative: norteño and narcocorrido show more music, AK-47s and guns in general, never-ending violence, rape and femicide, machismo and all its downsides, scorpions, crippling poverty and apathy, environmental destruction, cartels, mafiosos, narco everything (marijuana, cocaine, opium), pickups, cowboy boots made out of one endangered species or another, hats (cowboy / trucker) adorned with AK-47s or scorpions or pot leaves, and murder and vendettas feeding a forever series of murder and vendettas.

If that's your thing then this is a great book.

Towards the end of the book, page 241 to be exact, the author had this to say:

"We drank four or five gourds each and got nicely buzzed there on the rim of Sinforosa Canyon and it occurred to me that this was more or less the moment I had been looking for when I set out on his journey. Here I was in the heart of the Sierra Madre, about as far from consumer capitalism and the comfortably familiar as I could get, drinking tesguino with a wizened old Tarahumara and feeling that edgy, excited pleasure in being alive that follows a bad scare. It was an uncomfortable realization. To put it another way, here I was getting my kicks and curing my ennui in a place full of poverty and suffering, environmental and cultural destruction, widows and orphans from a slow-motion massacre. I tried to persuade myself that I was going to write something that would make a difference and help these people, but my capacity for self-delusion refused to stretch in that direction."

When I read that, I felt that it summarized the entire book which I'd gotten in the first 40-50 pages, but had taken the author weeks and months and 241 pages. God's Middle Finger is a fairly incredible story, but wasn't quite so fulfilling as a book. show less

God’s Middle Finger
Author: Richard Grant
Publisher: Free Press, Simon and Schuster
Published In: New York City, New York
Date: 2008
Pgs: 288

REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

Summary:
900 miles north to south, 11,000 feet in elevation, the Sierra Madre mountains dominate the interior of Mexico. Time has stood still here. Bandits, drug smugglers, Mormons, cave dwelling Tarahumara Indians, opium farmers, cowboys, and the outcasts of a continent hidden from wider civilization. For 15 years, Richard Grant’s fascination drove him into this region despite the dangers. Drug cartels at war with the Federales and the Mexican Army. Distrust of the outsider rampant. A narcocracy where the drug lords rule. Grant was advised to stay away. But the land and show more the people drew him in. Religion, cocaine, and buried treasure, welcome to the Sierra Madres. Hope you survive the experience.

Genre:
Adventure
Autobiography and memoir
Behind the Scenes
Biography
History
Non-fiction
Society
Travel guides
Travel writing

Why this book:
The blurb caught me.

______________________________________________________________________________

Favorite Character:
The Bad Man in the Dress

Least Favorite Character:
The author’s deathwish. I wonder if he had post divorce PTSD. The way that he went about exploring the Sierra Madre and the chances that he took point directly to a deathwish.

Favorite Scene:
The prologue: Running for his life from a group of hunters who are hunting him, just because. Just because they can. Because as they put it, the trigger finger needs it. Hunting him through woods and a creek where he is forced to growl at a wild animal nearby because he is afraid to tell it to leave him alone and scare it away with his human voice for fear that the hunters will hear it and know where he is.

When the ranch owner’s son who guided the author into the Sierra Madre on his first trip tells about the first time he encountered the Bad Man in the Dress. The BMD was hired to run the cattle ranch in the Sierra Madres for his father. The son was making a supply delivery to the remote ranch and when he arrives the place looks deserted. As he stops the truck and gets out, a cowboy in dress and makeup appears out of the treeline carrying a Winchester rifle and challenging him about who he was. Hundreds of miles from nowhere and this is what greets him unexpectedly. Not that there’s anything wrong with his lifestyle choices, I bet that was a helluva sight having that image suddenly appear out of the woods when you were expecting a gruff old ranchhand. And then, challenging the boss’s son about what he was doing there.

Hijacked into towing a bigger, heavier truck up a mountain road than his smaller truck could handle, the author’s truck’s transmission locks up. Smoke coming from under the truck, he struggles up the mountain track. The hijacker lets him go when the truck can’t pull anymore. He struggles off stuck in one gear with smoke coming from the truck and ends up missing his turn for Chinipas. His brakes filled with dust and squealling, stuck in a single gear, and struggling up the mountain. He finally crests the mountain and begins fighting the downhill hairpins. At this point, a kind of road mania gripped him. ...and this needs to be quoted direct from the text, it’s too delicious not to.

My mania curdled into a kind of demented bravado, where I no longer cared what happened to me or my truck. It was all in the hands of fate now and I dared fate to do its worst. I shit in the mouths of ten saints. I shit on the twenty-four testicles of the apostles of Christ! Whatever happened would happen and I didn’t give a goat-fornicating goddamn.

This whole story is a love affair that the author had with the Sierra Madres. All his deathwish, high risk, adventures in those mountains were all toward understanding them better, them and the people that live there. And then, you get to the climax where he’s being hunted by a gang of tooted up High Sierra hillbillies and he finally overcomes his love of the Madres.

Pacing:
The flow of the story is excellent.

Plot Holes/Out of Character:
It seems that the author should have taken more care. He put his life at considerable risk time after time throughout his journeys in the Madre. He was lucky. Occasion after occasion could have turned out much differently and he could have been one more person who disappeared in the Sierra Madre never to be seen again. Don’t ge me wrong. I love his story. But I hope no one takes him as their Joe Brown and goes on a quest through the Madre in the near future. Luck like that isn’t likely to repeat itself.

Hmm Moments:
The Aztecs claimed it from the local tribes, the Spanish took it from them, the Mexicans took it from them; thing is the local Comanches, Yanquis, and Apaches never really surrendered their hold on the area. The Sierra Madre is basically ungovernable by outside authority.

Many of the Tarahumara believe that God gets drunk during Holy Week. And that it is the only time of the year when the Devil has a chance to overpower the people and God. So it is their duty to drink as much corn beer as possible and get drunk...so they can protect God. I would love a closer anthropological explanation of how that came about instead of the matter-of-fact way it was presented. The Tarahumara Easter celebrations sound incredible.

The author illustrates his deathwish pretty well at one point or at least the jangle of stress nerves releasing after the near violence, near death experience has been survived. He had just survived a showdown on a remote road between logging and anti-logging factions with drug cartel connections with a hired assassin on the opposite side. After surviving, he is drinking corn beer with his Tarahumara compadres and getting that post event high from the stress draining away plus the beer.
...it occured to me that this was more of less the moment I had been looking for when I set out on this journey. Here I was in the heart of the Sierra Madre about as far from consumer capitalism and the comfortably familiar as I could get, drinking tesguino with a wizened old Tarahumara and feeing that edgy, excited pleasure in being alive after a bad scare. It was an uncomfortable realization. To put it another way, here I was getting my kicks and curing my ennui in a place full of poverty and suffering, environmental and cultural destruction, widows and orphans from a slow motion massacre. I tried to persuade myself that I was going to write something that would make a difference and help these people, but my capacity for self-delusion refused to stretch in that direction.

Why isn’t there a screenplay?
You could make excellent movies out of the stories that abound in the Sierra Madres. It would be nigh impossible with the near civil war constancy of violence and death that roll across the Sierra Madres to do a documentary that does the region justice or that would show the actual lives of the people there. It is dangerous for the police, Federales, and the soldiers in the region so camera crews from the Discovery Channel or Nat Geo would find it difficult and dangerous indeed.

Casting call:
How Hollywood hasn’t already made a movie about the Bad Man in the Dress astounds me. If there was ever a movie that needed to be made, this is one. A drug growing, drug dealing, smuggling, hitman up to no good and worse while occasionally dressing up in a dress and makeup. I can see Johnny Depp in the role. Not happy go lucky Jack Sparrow Johnny Depp, but dark, foreboding, loaded with gravitas Johnny Depp infusing the role with menace.
______________________________________________________________________________

Last Page Sound:
And the sun shines bright on the author as he comes to an awakening. Hopefully his ennui and post divorce stress was blasted clear by his deathwish vision quest through the Sierra Madres.

Author Assessment:
His writing style is great. The prose flows. The action is well presented and the exposition blends with the flow instead of stopping it down.

Editorial Assessment:
The story is well edited and put together.

Knee Jerk Reaction:
really good book

Disposition of Book:
Irving Public Library
Irving, TX

Would recommend to:
friends, family, colleagues

____________________________________________________________________________

Errata:
It is wild to me that the Sierra Madre rises that close to the US border, 20 miles, and the degree of lawlessness that seems to take place there. The Madre seems like the Wild West never ended. show less

You know that a) this is going be good and b) this is going to be different than anything you've ever read when the opening chapter finds the author being pursued by 2 crazy men with guns in the middle of the night out in the wilds of Durango, Mexico. Naturally, after you read that chapter, with a cliffhanger for an ending, you have to wonder how he got into this predicament and you're hooked. This book just didn't let up. Grant decides that he wants to traverse the Sierra Madre Occidental, a mountain range just south of the border between Arizona & Mexico. The Sierra Madre goes south from there , for about 900 or so miles -- with canyons that are deeper than our Grand Canyon, with mines, caves, cliffs, potholed roads, little towns, show more drug farms and a variety of people. He begins his trip with a friend telling him not to do it but this doesn't stop Grant. Everywhere he goes he makes a new contact to help him into the areas where gringos should not be travelling alone -- often dangerous, often a bit hostile, filled with testosterone that leaks from the aura of Mexican male machismo. It's the kind of Wild West lawlessness and total anarchy that intrigues him and he finds what he's looking for everywhere he goes. At first the author really got into his journey, but after some bandit encounters, policemen trying to set him up while they share cocaine with him, the negative treatment of women by said macho men, and a brush with death, the author has had enough. But the getting there, for the reader, is a fun and wild ride that I won't soon forget. What a great book! Along with his own travels and travails, he's thrown in historical accounts of the area, biographical info about those who've lived and traveled there, and some interesting facts about the pointless war on drugs fought by the US that we're never going to win because of the huge drug economy stemming from the Sierra Madre. Incredibly interesting -- you won't want to put the book down.

Very highly recommended. I would think that most people would enjoy this book, especially people who like a sort of gonzo-feel to their reading. show less

I have very mixed feelings here. The writer is engaging -- he tells a good story about a fascinating place. However, he also makes really, really stupid choices, so I find it hard to care when he puts himself in danger. I don't enjoy feeling judgmental about other people, so the whole cycle is very uncomfortable to me. I read about 3/4 of the book before it had to go back to the library, and I don't feel the need to hear the rest of the adventure.

On the other hand, I knew nothing about the Sierra Madres, and the history was a very interesting read.

Author Grant nurtured an "obsessive fascination" for Mexico's 900-mile long Sierra Madre mountain range for many years. In 2007 he began a journey through the region, beginning just over the U.S.-Mexican border in Arizona, and into the lawless Mexican states of Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa. The region has always been a sanctuary for revolutionaries, smugglers, criminals and other miscreants; in the late 90s it became a principal trafficking route of cocaine, heroin and marijuana into the U.S. Drugs have certainly made an already dangerous area more so, and residents of the Sierra are very generally very suspicious about outsiders. Grant profiles the region with a reporter's camera eye and he manages to uncover uncommon hospitality and show more humor in one of the most deadly regions of Latin America, if not the world; he also encounters many tense and dangerous situations, and ultimately barely lives to write this book. show less

British travel writer Richard Grant (who lives in Arizona) recently spent some travel time in the Sierra Madre mountains of northwest Mexico. It is home to narco gangsters, bandits, crippling poverty and general lawlessness. The murder rate in some areas is 10 times the worst American inner cities with some small villages completely wiped out in blood feuds (imagine Hatfield and McCoy). It is the Wild West and begins just 20 miles from the US border of Arizona.

God's Middle Finger is the type of book I call "Dark Tourism", intentionally going into the "World's Most Dangerous Places" simply for the thrill of it. Books like this let the reader feel better about their relative security and comfort, however they rarely capture what it's show more really like for someone living there. By foregrounding the dangerous and violent aspects for the sake of a rush, it's difficult to know if we are really seeing an accurate picture of what the people are really like, or rather seen through the eyes of a thrill seeking tourist. It's not my intention to be polemical because there are some positive things that can be said about this book. If your able to look past Grants adrenalin fueled focus on murder and gangsters, the book is a great way to learn about some of the history and people of the Sierra Madre region of Mexico; and the nature of the Mexican drug crime problem in general. It is sorely lacking a map, but I was able to trace some of his route using Google Maps, which combined with the satellite view, provides some visual measure of the extreme topography that has made it a favorite haunt of outlaws.

The book starts and ends with a high adrenalin frame story involving an encounter with bandits - I found it too good to be true, too novelistic, and too easily invented (relatives of Pancho Villa?) - we will never know but most of the book seems credible enough. Overall I credit Grant with stoking my interest in reading more about the region (there is an excellent bibliography). Many of the themes, in particular "honor cultures", can also be found in Deliverance, it's a good coda and a little closer to home for those fascinated by the dialectic between lawful society and honor cultures.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd show less

A thrilling page turner of an adventure novel. You learn the history and current state of north central Mexico's Sierra Madre mountain range as the author tries to travel its spine in order to see if it is really as dangerous as you have heard. It feels like a mix of Sebastian Junger and Ernest Hemingway. It's hard to tell if the overwhelming narco-traffic content is embellished, but I sense that it's not. It certainly gives more perspective on the nature of the drug trade coming from Mexico to the US, and the lifestyle of those willingly or unwillingly involved.

It's not often that I bring a book to work with me and hope for red lights to be longer so I can read a bit more on stops in the drive.