The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and B. Traven

 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven (1935) 313 pages

I listened to the audiobook on Hoopla narrated by three voices. I love the movie version from 1948 and have been curious to check out the source material. The book has a lot more background information, but not about the three main gold prospector characters. Instead, the author paints a picture of Mexico, its bandits, its socio-religious conditions, and other backstories about people craving gold. The plot with Dobbs, Curtin, and Howard is nearly identical to the movie. Howard is the knowledgeable old-timer. Dobbs and Curtin first meet on an oil drilling contract and then go searching for gold in the mountains. Trust and saving each others' lives eventually devolves into paranoid distrust and murderous intentions. Dobbs, in particular, has an epic descent into madness over his greed for gold.

B. Traven: Portrait of a Famous Unknown by Golo (2024) 144 pages

This graphic nonfiction is translated from French. I was curious to learn more about the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The enigma, B. Traven, remains an enigma. He used many pseudonyms through the years. Golo uses Traven's novels to piece together what his life experiences might have been. It gets into the weeds of German politics between WWI and WWII. One of his novels is about the terrible conditions working shoveling coal on a steam ship, and so, it is thought it is based on his lived experience, a job that allowed him to escape Germany and the rise of Naziism. When he begins living in Mexico I was much more engaged in the life story. He wrote many novels set in Mexico. The art of the graphic novel is fairly busy (especially on the color montage pages), so I didn't find much clarity about the man.

King Leopold's Ghost

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild (1998) 442 pages

A friend planned a Jolabokaflod event around New Year's this year. It was my first time participating in the Icelandic Yule book flood tradition. This history book was gifted to me as a recommended read. 

This is about the exploration and colonization of the Congo. The Belgian King Leopold's rapacious rule for resources such as ivory and rubber caused the many indigenous African peoples to be enslaved, traumatized, and killed. There were a few journalists and missionaries who protested despite efforts by the state to silence them. 

It was well-researched and revealed how rarely the Africans' experience was given voice by Europeans and Americans. It was fascinating and disturbing history. Yet there were heroes highlighted in the Congo reform movement. E. D. Morel, Roger Casement, George Washington Williams, William Sheppard, and Hezekiah Andrew Shanu each are revealed to have achieved something in the fight against Leopold's human rights crimes.
 

Empire of Pain

 

Empire of Pain: the Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty / Patrick Radden Keefe, 535 pp.

A great read, and a first-rate emetic.  That is, don't read if you don't want to feel disgusted to the point of extreme nausea.  

Radden Keefe is the author of the wonderful Say Nothing: a True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.   In Empire his brilliant research and storytelling combine to shed light on the Sacklers, the extraordinarily secretive family behind Purdue Pharma, maker of Oxycontin.  The opioid epidemic in the U.S. is an enormous story which couldn't possibly be contained in one book.  Radden Keefe wisely focuses on the extended family at the crisis' heart.   The founding brothers are Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond, who came of age in Depression-era Brooklyn in an immigrant household, worked ferociously hard, and became medical doctors, pharmaceutical executives, and marketing geniuses.  It was Arthur Sackler who spearheaded the marketing campaign for Valium as a drug so safe that it should be used widely and often for any manner of emotional distress.  

The Sackler strategy of de-stigmatizing a powerful drug worked even better for Oxycontin. The genius, again, lay in convincing doctors, and the public, that a morphine product had uses well beyond the standard end-of-life cancer palliative.  Back pain? Oral surgery? Fear not!  The poppy makes us all feel better, and it's perfectly safe.  It would be funny if not for the dead, by many counts at least 500,000 and growing.  

Alas, the marketing is only the tip of the perfidy iceberg.  Read on, and keep that Pepto Bismol handy.  (speaking of pharmaceutical marketing...)

Ready Player One

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, 374 pages.

Wade lives in a trailer in the "stacks," sort of a homemade, multilevel, trailer park in Oklahoma City, with his aunt, her boyfriend, and two other families. It may sound crowded, but it's a double-wide trailer and Wade has a space in the laundry room. Actually, Wade spends as little time in the trailer as possible. He has his own hideout in a partially crushed van, and he spends most of his time online in the OASIS, a virtual world created by the late James Halliday. Halliday left a quest behind when he died, and every gamer in the world is looking for clues, and everybody in this decaying, dystopian future world is watching. Wade, as his avatar Parzival, uncovers the location of the copper key, and together with his friend Aetch, famed gunter (short for Egg-hunter) Art3mis, and two "brothers" from Japan, he races to find the rest of the clues, keys, and gates before the evil corporate "sixers." I read this several years ago, and then recently watched the movie. I listened to the downloadable audio this time partly because it was available and because the movie was pretty good. I liked the '80s details of the book better than those in the movie. A fun read. More of a YA read than I remembered.