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The Way That Leads Among the Lost
- Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos
- Narrated by: Inés del Castillo
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
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The Way That Leads Among the Lost
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Publisher's Summary
Based on over a decade of research, a powerful, moving work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates the little-known world of the anexos of Mexico City, the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war.
The Way That Leads Among the Lost reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness, spread across Mexico City’s tenements and reaching into the United States. Run and inhabited by Mexico’s most marginalized populations, they are controversial for their illegality and their use of coercion. Yet for many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, these rooms offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond them—the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war.
This is the first book ever written on the anexos. Garcia, who spent a decade conducting anthropological fieldwork in Mexico City, draws listeners into their many dimensions, casting light on the mothers and their children who are entangled in this hidden world. Following the stories of its denizens, she asks what these places are, why they exist, and what they reflect about Mexico and the wider world. With extraordinary empathy and a sharp eye for detail, Garcia attends to the lives that the anexos both sustain and erode, wrestling with the question of why mothers turn to them as a site of refuge even as they reproduce violence. Woven into these portraits is Garcia’s own powerful story of family, childhood, homelessness, and drugs—a blend of ethnography and memoir converging on a set of fundamental questions about the many forms and meanings that violence, love, care, family, and hope may take.
Infused with profound ethnographic richness and moral urgency, The Way That Leads Among the Lost is a stunning work of narrative nonfiction, a book that will leave a deep mark on listeners.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
What the critics say
“[An] astute and harrowing chronicle . . . [Garcia’s] approach is studied and intimate as she mixes memoir and academic rigor to enter the traumas of lives uprooted and too often shattered by addiction . . . Given ongoing arguments over immigration, drug use, and legalization, Garcia’s outstanding book adds compassion and insight to this important social and political discussion.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Angela Garcia is a card-carrying anthropologist and ethnographer yet her writing reads like the best of literary nonfiction. The world she describes is close at hand and yet most of us would be fearful to get anywhere near, let alone embed ourselves within it. An utterly fascinating story.”—Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water
"This probing book raises ethical questions about the use of violence as a rehabilitative tool. It also illuminates the role of the U.S. in perpetuating human suffering through military aid, illegally trafficked guns, and its insatiable hunger for drugs while immersing readers in Garcia’s own struggle to overcome the demons of a painful past. An engaging and insightful book."—Kirkus Reviews