About book Doctor Dealer: The Rise And Fall Of An All-American Boy And His Multimillion-Dollar Cocaine Empire (2001)
I've read several of Bowden's books - Black hawk Down, Killing Pablo and Guests of the Ayatollah, among them - and all have been riveting, and am planning to read his latest about the capture of Bin Laden. This book, however, fell short of the standards of those three in particular. Maybe it was because of the main character in this one, who from the beginning was of a criminal ilk, so to my mind, there was no fall from grace. He really wasn't the "all-American" boy, but a drug dealer and poser from the get go. It would have been a more compelling tale had he actually been a stand up guy who got onto a the slippery slope and couldn't control the descent. Or maybe it was that this was one of Bowden's earliest books so he hadn't quite honed the razor sharp story telling of the later books. Either way, I found myself counting the pages until the end of the book, and hoping to finish it quickly. Not his best - his other books are well worth reading, though.
I love most things Thompson in nature. But I didn't like this book. I thought it was rubbish. I didn't think the writing was good. So predictable. Here is a new character, paragraph description, here is what he does. Repeated over, and over, and over. Larry Lavin was obviously smart as hell but his greed matched that. He didn't know when the hell to get out of the cocaine trade. On the bright side, it seems like he is happy in jail. Which begs the question, he could have probably been plenty happy enough earning 100k a year as a dentist, without being behind bars. Too bad he couldn't realize it. Both the author and the protagonist, neither do I want to emulate.
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