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A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior (Hardcover)

~ Charles Bowden (Author) "HE PUTS THE GUN DOWN..." (more)
Key Phrases: Joey O'Shay, New York, Johnny Boy (more...)
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
Price: $24.00 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
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A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior + Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family + Contrabando: Confessions of a Drug-Smuggling Texas Cowboy
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Readers drawn into the brutal and corrupt realities of the war on drugs in Bowden's much-acclaimed Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (2002) are likely to be disappointed by his latest foray into that world. Bowden begins with a brilliantly lyrical opening chapter, replete with vivid descriptions of the unnamed city where most of the action is set, bringing its sounds, smells and throbbing pulse to life. But the promise of that introduction to the narcotics agent referred to only by his pseudonym, Joey O'Shay, is unfulfilled; the evolution of a multimillion-dollar heroin deal is uncompelling and not always easy to follow, and O'Shay is ultimately unsympathetic. In fact, many will have difficulty parsing his frequent interior monologues to get a clear picture of which side of the law he's really on, and the numerous references to the themes of Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl's landmark Man's Search for Meaning in the drug agent's life hint at a psychological depth that's not fully developed. The hazards of undercover work and the strains on the agent's sanity and conscience have all been portrayed before in memoirs like that of the FBI's Mafia infiltrator Joe Pistone, and O'Shay's story feels more like an unaired episode of Miami Vice than something new and noteworthy. Agent, Anderson/Grinberg Literary Management.(July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

PRAISE FOR DOWN BY THE RIVER
"An extraordinary book-daring, genre-bending, literary, and wise." -CHICAGO TRIBUNE

"If it's the ugly truth about the war on drugs you're after, you won't find a better-and better-written-piece of reporting." -ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY


Readers drawn into the brutal and corrupt realities of the war on drugs in Bowden's much-acclaimed Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (2002) are likely to be disappointed by his latest foray into that world. Bowden begins with a brilliantly lyrical opening chapter, replete with vivid descriptions of the unnamed city where most of the action is set, bringing its sounds, smells and throbbing pulse to life. But the promise of that introduction to the narcotics agent referred to only by his pseudonym, Joey O'Shay, is unfulfilled; the evolution of a multimillion-dollar heroin deal is uncompelling and not always easy to follow, and O'Shay is ultimately unsympathetic. In fact, many will have difficulty parsing his frequent interior monologues to get a clear picture of which side of the law he's really on, and the numerous references to the themes of Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl's landmark Man's Search for Meaning in the drug agent's life hint at a psychological depth that's not fully developed. The hazards of undercover work and the strains on the agent's sanity and conscience have all been portrayed before in memoirs like that of the FBI's Mafia infiltrator Joe Pistone, and O'Shay's story feels more like an unaired episode of Miami Vice than something new and noteworthy. Agent, Anderson/Grinberg Literary Management. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. (Publishers Weekly )
See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (July 6, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0151011834
  • ISBN-13: 978-0151011834
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,051,529 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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More About the Author

Charles Bowden
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Front Cover | Front Flap | First Pages | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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HE PUTS THE GUN DOWN. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Joey O'Shay, New York, Johnny Boy, Viktor Frankl, Angel Sonrisa, Evil Creature, United States, Joe the Crow, Paradise Cove, The Golem
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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
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4.8 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Supply and demand, June 23, 2005
"The city does not sleep at this hour...the streets belong to the feral, to predators coursing its arteries for prey". Joey O'Shay is agent for the DEA, deep undercover, his home for the last twenty years the dark streets, the shadowed alleys, where drugs are for sale and life is cheap. His network of agents and informants bring the players close. O'Shay takes them in and odes the deal.

The drug trade is nothing if not cynical and Joey has been too long behind the scenes, making deals and dodging death, caught up in a web of deceit that he manipulates so skillfully, he has thus far avoided the bullet with his name on it. But the agent is weary, grown used to the game, but with no way out. So he continues setting up the deals, meeting with the Mexicans and the Colombians, pushing the tons of cocaine, marijuana and heroin for the insatiable appetites of addicts.

This is a world of ambiguities, where contradictions abound, where day is night and the player's sleep with evil. This book enters a world beyond the senses, revealing the titillating details of drug trafficking, the connections, the cold business of exchanging money for product. Joey O'Shay is the doer, the man behind the scenes, building an almost impenetrable web of associations. O'Shay lives his obsession, always planning, always in the deal, a long time survivor who is reaching some kind of crisis, inhabiting this cold life for too long.

His career started with breaking in doors and busting small-time dealers, but has progressed, along with his skills, to include the big Colombians who move enormous quantities of product. These are the deals that please the bureaucrats of the DEA and their bosses in Washington, the phone calls that can be traced to map out an entire network. And O'Shay is never there for the take-down; he moves on to the next deal. To break the spell of this world and make it more livable, the agent paints, listens to music late at night and reads a holocaust survivor's account of the death camps ("Man's Search for Meaning"), identifying with the author's feelings.

Edgy and brutal, O'Shay's stream-of-consciousness hops from past to present, tossing bits of information against the wall like a Jackson Pollock painting. He is surrounded by a cast of shadowy characters: Cosima, his best confidential informant; Alvarez, a man ready to make a deal to save his own life after losing other people`s money; Bobbie, part of the straight world, but drawn to the darker one, close enough to O'Shay to read his state of mind; and Gloria, Cosima's friend and South American connection, who makes the mistake of trusting O'Shay's soft words and pays for it with her freedom.

This book is a psychological investigation of one man's life as he goes about increasingly difficult undercover work for the DEA, but the real toll is on his mind, the cost of business eating away at his sense of himself: "It is the self-questioning and needing to know ore about the meaning of life...that frightens me. Almost a fear that when I stop pursuing them... I must pursue who I really am or what I became." O'Shay is a very smooth thug and a killer, but he works for the good guys, although now he identifies more with the dealers he sets up. He stays in a life that rots the soul, as jaded as a hardened criminal, unconnected and untouched by humanity because it is too dangerous. He is the Shadow in the City, but it's also the specter of death that haunts his every move. He has become a creature of the streets and it is that private hell that he shares with the author, against a backdrop of other agents and CI's, a lonely figure trying to work his way back to himself. It is the price he pays for this job. Luan Gaines/2005.




 
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars It ain't a pretty world, March 28, 2006
By Fifi McSneaky (Somewhere in the West) - See all my reviews
I'm an unabashed Bowden fan -- I'd read his grocery list if he published it. This isn't his best book (that honor would lie, in my mind, with either "Blood Orchid" or "Down by the River") and he does things a little differently here, such as using more traditional storytelling devices, such as suspense. That said, I read it straight through, hanging on every word. This is a dark and depressing book -- the kind that made me question not only what kind of world we live in, but also what I even know about the world today. Throughout his entire career, Bowden has worked hard, finding characters such as Joey O'Shay, the undercover drug "warrior" in this book -- and I get the impression that he devours their insanity, insecurities and internal demons and can only try and purge that burden by writing books that the rest of us will then wonder about long after we've finished reading them. There are two main reasons to read this book: One, because it's really good. And two, because smart journalists and great writers such as Bowden are a rarity and deserve to be supported whenever they share their thoughts and experiences with the rest of us.


 
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Winning the Battles on Drugs, Not Affecting the War, July 27, 2005
One definition of insanity is that a person keeps doing the same thing over and over even after he knows that it won't work. I have met people like Joey O'Shay who have such a deep seated drive to wipe out the drug business that they almost couldn't function doing anything else. Popeye Doyle of French Connection fame was one.

I've also seen them reach the point where perhaps they have been shot a time or two, perhaps they have looked at all the drugs that the French Connection stopped from comming into the country ($32,000,000) doesn't mean that drugs are any harder to get. (In fact police tell me that the drugs on the street are of higher quality and lower price than ever before.) Then like Joey O'Shay they begin to question the futility of our never ending war on drugs. And somewhere along there Mr. O'Shay you'd better find a way to leave this life behind.

I do not profess to know the answer to the drug problem, but, Guys, this isn't working.

As you might guess, in this book Joey O'Shay is a cop on the undercover drug beat. He's being very successful, but the people he puts away are replaced immediately. He's involved with another huge drug deal. He's having a problem understanding that winning the battles he is fighting isn't winning the war.

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 		 Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Undercover with a reverse twist
Very well written, if somewhat uneven, this "non fiction novel" traces the career of a master undercover "nark" who slowly comes to realize that the "honor among theives" of the...
Published 5 months ago by P. J. Stiles

5.0 out of 5 stars haunting true story of u/c narcotics officer
As he did in Down by the River, Charles Bowden takes the reader deep into the shadow world that is the war on drugs.
Published on December 26, 2006 by R. Ellison

5.0 out of 5 stars A Shadow in the City:Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior
In the beginning chapters I judged the style as a bit aloof. It does not take long, however for Charles Bowden's wordcraft and narrative style to hook you into the surreal life...
Published on September 19, 2005 by Mark E. Moses

5.0 out of 5 stars In Dubious Battle
In January of 1935, shortly before Steinbeck sent off his manuscript of "In Dubious Battle," he wrote, "But man hates something in himself.
Published on August 2, 2005 by James L. Breithaupt

5.0 out of 5 stars Welcome to the front lines of the war on drugs
Bowden's latest sheds light on a dark subject-the life and times of Joey O'Shay, a man who fought on the front lines of this thing we call the war on drugs for the past...
Published on June 27, 2005 by Don H. Ford Jr.

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