Luis Alberto Urrea - The Devils Highway: A True Story

Copyright 2004 by Luis Urrea

Reading group guide copyright 2005 by Luis Alberto Urrea and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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First eook Edition: November 2008

ISBN: 978-0-316-04928-3

EXTRAORDINARY ACCLAIM FOR LUIS ALBERTO URREAS

THE DEVILS HIGHWAY

A reading of The Devils Highway will undoubtedly brace your soul and remind you that all of us, rich or poor, brown, white, black, or yellow, are traveling through these parts for only a little while. This intense and somehow, despite all the torture and death and betrayal it stands as a witness to, congenial book gives some of [those whove died crossing the border] the chance, however briefly, to cross back over the final border and return to the light.

Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle

Luis Alberto Urrea ventured into the world of pollos and polleros, and his book rings with the authenticity and authority of an eyewitness. At the same time, he writes with empathy and insight about the migrants and the agents he accompanied into the wilderness. Above all, the tale he tells in The Devils Highway comes vividly alive with a richness of language and a mastery of narrative detail that only the most gifted of writers are able to achieve.

Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Urreas prose takes you right down to the desert floor as the men struggle to survive, in the same way Jon Krakauer put you atop Mount Everest in his book Into Thin Air.

Michael Kapellas, Naperville Sun

A powerful, almost diabolical impression of the disaster and the exploitative conditions at the border. Urrea shows immigration policy on the human level.

Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

Luis Alberto Urreas approach is a smart one: instead of writing a dry, fact-based piece of journalism littered with excerpts from official documents, he paces the book like a novel, full of detail and emotion. He spends time with the border patrol, showing the good and the bad. He doesnt make martyrs out of the walkers. Instead of railing passionately against the Mexican and American governmentshis sympathy clearly leans toward those who try to crosshe saves all the facts and figures for the last chapter, presenting them calmly. By then, no matter what your opinion on border policy, youve been sucked in by the story and characters. The writing is exceptional. The descriptions of the deserts beauty are poetic. Its a beautiful book about a horrible trip.

Emiliana Sandoval, Detroit Free Press

The best thing Ive read in years. Like his brilliant Across the Wire, Luis Urreas The Devils Highway is rich, intimate, powerful, terrifying, and absolutely necessary. Everyone should read this book.

Stewart ONan

A painstaking, unsentimental, and oddly lyrical chronology of the traveling partys horrific trek through the Sonora. Patient, well-crafted, and heartbreaking.

Chris Lehmann, Washington Post Book World

Urrea has been preparing to tell this story his whole career, and he does it brilliantly. Hes a natural investigator, alive to all the galling ironies of policy, prejudice, and circumstance, and he knows the terrain. The Devils Highway is strong medicine: a grisly parable, but an ultimately fitting tribute to the dead.

Brad Weiners, Outside

From the sad personal effects of the dead men to the unexpected poetry of a survivors police testimony, Urrea has created a full-blooded narrative.

Dylan Foley, Newark Star-Ledger

Tragic drama puts a human face on the foibles of mankind. Luis Urrea has put a face on one of the great tragedies of our time, death and survival on the U.S.-Mexican border. Like the ancient Greek plays, The Devils Highway elevates the death of the Yuma 14 to the role of tragic heroes. So we can say a new genre is born in our land; call it Frontera tragic drama.

Rudolfo Anaya

Luis Urrea writes about U.S.-Mexican border culture with a tragic and beautiful intimacy that has no equal. His uncanny ability to remain perched on the hyphen between two countries/identities as a careful observer of both worldsof how they blur and yet remain separateis the unique gift of The Devils Highway. The books rare power is that it is both epic in scopea trek through the wilderness in search of the promised landand intensely personal.

Tom Montgomery-Fate, Boston Globe

A tour de force account of an adventure unlike the ones youre used to reading.

Jonathan Miles, Mens Journal

Sublimely written. Urrea puts all his skills to their best use in telling how and why an ordinary eventan illegal border crossing went so terribly wrong.

Jeff Baker, Portland Oregonian

Luis Alberto Urrea stuns us into judgment with a poetically austere account of the tragedy that he calls the big die-off, the largest death event in border history. Urrea has a talent commensurate to the task.

Anne Bartlett, Miami Herald

Dramatic as a Tolstoy novel, full of hope and injustice, with overtones that are positively biblical. Urreas own gift for precise and original language should put this book on the map.

Susan Zakin, LA Weekly

Impassioned and poetic. Urrea has written one of the great sur-realistic tragedies of the global age. He has captured the fantastic and incongruous set of forces, images, and happenings that make up the contradictions that are the borderlands.

Jefferson Cowie, Chicago Tribune

The Devils Highway is a stunning book: powerful, poetic, passionate, and moving. It takes a single tragic incident, refracts it through history and mythology, and uses the result not only to examine the relationship between the rich and the poor, the weak and the powerful, but to illuminate the nature of human beings at their most desperate, their most devious, and their most courageous. Quite simply, its superb.

John Connolly

An evocative, nonlinear narrative style makes the book read more like high-brow adventure literature than narrative journalism.

Alisa Roth, Newsday

Few authors could write so entertainingly about such tragedy, fewer yet could do so with authority, and perhaps only one could be fair to the U.S. Border Patrol at the same time. Luis Urrea has a large heart and a wicked wit, and has written a wonderful book.

Ted Conover

An important bookone that is beautifully written as well as shocking. If you read it, you will never forget about the untold scores of men and womenand childrenwho die every year in the dead-liest stretch of desert in America.

Ann LaFarge, Taconic Press

A masterstroke, an instant classic of the literature of that brave new world of our future we call la frontera, the border. Urrea writes with wit, passion, skill, and love. His is a very human book about a very human tragedy happening every single day in the deserts around us.

Jon Shumaker, Tucson Weekly

A riveting account of the 2001 border crossing of twenty-six Mexican men into the stretch of Arizona desert commonly called the Devils Highwaya nod to its ghastly history of rotting corpses and scorching conditions. Urreas exhaustive research and incisive analysis provide searing sociopolitical context, while his poetic prose viscerally captures the groups horror at being abandoned by their guide and the ritualistic death march that claimed fourteen lives.