The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [1]
— Brad Weiners, Outside
“From the sad personal effects of the dead men to the unexpected poetry of a survivor’s 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 Devil’s 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 worlds—of how they blur and yet remain separate—is the unique gift of The Devil’s Highway. … The book’s rare power is that it is both epic in scope—a trek through the wilderness in search of ‘the promised land’—and intensely personal.”
— Tom Montgomery-Fate, Boston Globe
“A tour de force account of an adventure unlike the ones you’re used to reading.”
— Jonathan Miles, Men’s Journal
“Sublimely written. … Urrea puts all his skills to their best use in telling how and why an ordinary event—an 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. … Urrea’s 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 Devil’s 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, it’s 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 book—one that is beautifully written as well as shocking. If you read it, you will never forget about the untold scores of men and women—and children—who 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 Devil’s Highway—a nod to its ghastly history of rotting corpses and scorching conditions. Urrea’s exhaustive