author: Tim Gaynor

name: Steev

average rating: 3.12

book published: 2009

rating: 2

read at: 2010/04/04

date added: 2010/04/06

shelves: border, politics

review:
This is all pretty focused on law enforcement on the border - Which I guess is okay if that's all you want, and I'd imagine that a lot of people want just that. Proof that they're being kept safe, that those bad brown guys from down south are being rounded up, just like in "Cops." But, there's way too much respect and attention paid to cops in this world and this issue. Do we need another book that so glowingly portrays them? What's more, the book basically reads like the Public Information Officer from the Border Patrol wrote it. It's pretty much by-the-numbers, party line boilerplate.



And the boilerplate isn't even very well crafted. Gaynor's just not that good of a writer, at least of the sort of storyish, loose form he's going for. I'm sure he does fine with short news pieces for Reuters. But his prose here is really overwrought and contrived, full of really strained metaphors and extraneous adjectives popping out everywhere. For instance, when describing what migrants in the desert at night look like when viewed in a thermal-imaging camera, he writes, "White faces dancing against a black background, like the disembodied visages in a haunting and playful Black Light Theatre company production in Prague." Huh? What? I've even been to Prague, spent about a week there, never heard of the Black Light Theatre. Do you think average middlebrow Americans reading this book will get this allusion? C'mon, Tim, metaphors are intended to help you describe something by comparing it to something MORE familiar to you than the actual thing, not less familiar.



Some of his phrasing is just really cumbersome and redundant too. Like this sentence: "The extent of that involvement became clear in a case that broke in North Carolina several years before the September 11 attacks, back in 1995."



So, let's think about this sentence in detail: once you've said 1995, do you really need to say it was several years before 9/11? Of course not. But, my guess is that to keep the chapter on terrorism sizzling and alive, Gaynor felt the need to continually re-mention that day of infamy. He might as well just chant: "Terrorists, terrorist, middle east, 9/11, terrorism, Lebanese, terrorism, 9/11, Muslims, 9/11, 9/11, border, middle east, lebanese, hajib, 9/11, hizballah." Puh-lease....



Or speaking about motivation for phrasing, check this out: When describing a terrorism suspect who slipped into the U.S. in the trunk of a car crossing from Mexico, Gaynor writes "It was a stunning and tantalizing detail." What??! "tantalizing" - to who? To your editors? To right wing xenophobes buying your book? To people who want have a vested interest in a juicy story about smugglers helping terrorists sneak into our country?



In the afterword, Gaynor is up front about the fact that he is specifically focusing on law enforcement. But just being honest about his focus doesn't mean it's responsible journalism. The border and immigration issue is too complicated and big to simply tout the cops as if they're comic book superheros in a vacuum. "This is textbook. It's as good as it gets," says one Border Patrol Predator drone pilot interviewed - and that's pretty much the mood for the entire book: textbook. Propaganda. (In the section on Native American border patrol trackers, he says the group is "stealthy, fast, intuitive, and utterly relentless." Utterly? Really?) Yes, look at our valiant officials keeping us safe, even from corruption, let's never try stepping out of the line to look at the systematic detainee abuse by those officials, at the privatization of detention centers on the border, at the cold-blooded murder of migrants by agents, at the larger picture of free trade policy that creates these economic migrants, at the horribly broken drug policy that keeps the narcotraffickers rich and powerful. Nothing but textbook. I know this isn't as good as it gets.



I do have to say that I will give this book 2 stars instead of 1, because I did learn a lot about the inner workings of how ports of entry work, how drone patrol operations happen, and other such enforcement ephemera. But I feel as though most of this I could have got from the Homeland Security Department website. Journalists have a responsibility to dig deeper.