News of a Kidnapping

Name: News of a Kidnapping
Brand: Blackstone Audiobooks
Availability: InStock
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
ISBN: 9781665039413

Author: Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman

Narrator: Christopher Salazar

Unabridged: 11 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Published: 08/28/2021

Categories: Nonfiction, History, Latin American History, True Crime, Organized Crime, Social Science, Criminology, Biography & Autobiography

Synopsis

Consumed these past twenty years by a “biblical holocaust,” Colombia has endured leftist insurgencies, right-wing death squads, currency collapses, cholera epidemics, and, most recently and corrosively, drug trafficking. Returning to his days as a reporter for El Espectador, Gabriel García Márquez chronicles, with consummate skill, the period in late 1990 when Colombian security forces mounted a nationwide manhunt for Pablo Escobar, the ruthless and elusive head of the Medellin cartel. Ten men and women were abducted by Escobar’s henchmen and used as bargaining chips against extradition to the United States. From the testimonies and diaries of the survivors, García Márquez reconstructs their bizarre ordeal with cinematic intensity, breathtaking language, and rigor. We are drawn into a world that, like some phantasmagorical setting in a great García Márquez novel, we can scarcely believe exists but that continually shocks us with its cold, hard reality.

About Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) was an author, journalist, and pioneer of the Latin American boom. Among his many books are The Autumn of the Patriarch, No One Writes to the Colonel, Love in the Time of Cholera, Living to Tell the Tale, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and the classic One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

About Edith Grossman

Edith Grossman (1936 - 2023) translated the poetry and prose of major Spanish-language and Latin American authors, including Nobel laureates Gabriel García Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as Alvaro Mutis, Mayra Montero, and Miguel de Cervantes.

About Christopher Salazar

Christopher Salazar, originally from Miami, Florida, is classically trained with an MFA from the Old Globe. He has worked with top theater companies in New York, Los Angeles, and regionally throughout the country.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim

[Revised 2/7/23] Truth is stranger than fiction. Marquez returns to his roots as a journalist in this 1996 true account of kidnappings in Colombia. He interviewed the survivors and relatives of ten people, mostly prominent citizens, who were kidnapped in 1990 by Colombia’s drug lord and narco-terrori......more

Goodreads review by Issa

احدى المخطوفات لديها علاقة مع الكاتب العظيم ماركيز وطلبت منه تأليف كتاب عن اختطافها هي وشقيقة زوجها. كان من الممكن ان يكون كتابا عاديا ولكن اكتشف ان ظروف اختطافها لا يمكن فصلها عن ظروف الاختطافات الاخرى والتي كانت مجموعها عشرة أشخاص. يركز المظؤلف على ظروف الاختطاف والمعاملة التي كانت يتلقاها المخطوفين......more

Goodreads review by Barbara

For years, the Medellin Drug Cartel led by Pablo Escobar terrorized Garcia Marquez's home country of Colombia. The author, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, called this reign of terror a "biblical Holocaust"(1970's - early 1980's). It was a period during which four presidential can......more

Quotes

“Marquez’s calm sympathy reaches beyond these leading families taken prisoner by the war on drugs; he takes a human interest in the foot-soldiers who face certain death in Escobar’s service—and even in Escobar himself, a doomed antihero whose ‘most unsettling and dangerous aspect…was his total inability to distinguish between good and evil.’ Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book is its insistence on individual choice between good and evil, pluck and cowardice, at a moment when a lesser writer might see only the drama of a gripping true-crime story, with villains and victims foreordained.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Garcia Marquez is concerned with the kidnapping, with relating a singular experience of Colombia that threatened its social and political framework. And he tracks the story like a detective, weaving in the voices of all the players, ferreting out the nuances in their relationships, and cunningly revealing a country torn asunder by the quest for drug traffickers, or rather the mother of all drug traffickers, Pablo Escobar.” Booklist (starred review)

“García Márquez’s consummate rendering of this hostage-taking looms as the symbol of an entire country held hostage to invisible yet violently ever-present drug lords.” Kirkus Reviews