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The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code Of Silence And The Biggest Marijuana Bust In American History (2012)

by James Higdon(Favorite Author)

3.57 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0762778237 (ISBN13: 9780762778232)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Lyons Press

review 1: What a disappointment. What is certainly a fascinating story is all but ruined by an author who did not have the skill set to pull it off. This book literally needed to have around 200 pages removed to make it coherent. Instead it is a repetitive and rambling attempt at telling a story. Incredibly if you read the very long prologue at the beginning of the book it is a summary of almost exactly what is in the next several hundred pages and gives every interesting aspect of the story say. Pretty much proves this entire story could have been told in a long magazine article rather than an almost 400 page book.
review 2: First, this is an interesting book and I liked it. Second, I could never produce something on a par with it and I respect the effort and diligence ... morethat went into its creation. However, I do have a few criticisms. I found that I enjoyed the portions that were based on actual records better than the stuff that's reported from one-on-one interviews with the "hillbillies" who produced all that Kentucky grass. The author is perhaps a bit too credulous when relating some of the stories he was told by these folks. OTOH, the solid straight reporting in much of the book balances those stories with enough facts that the stories are still fun to read, if not exactly "according to Hoyle" journalism.My larger gripe is the author's insertion of his own book creation/subpeona to testify story near the end of the book. I found this part unnecessary and a little too self-satisfied for my taste (the Obama '08 stuff looks particularly naive in light of the way his presidency has, IMO predictably, played out). But again there is a shorter sort of coda that takes well-earned shots at a trigger happy US Marshall with some solid reporting to balance that excess. This shorter end portion, although also self-referential, works much better. It even includes a final sentence that provides a more level-headed assessment of the possibility that Obama's 2008 election would result in any positive developments in our absolutely insane war on drugs.Finally, I listened to the audiobook version and the narration was clear and easy to follow. Unfortunately, the narrator was clearly unfamiliar with the regional pronunciations of central Kentucky while I am not. This didn't ruin anything about the book, but each appearance of, for instance, "Lebanon" or "Courier-Journal" produced a slight self-referential smirk from this Hardin County guy. less

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