Pablo Escobar: My Father

In this surprisingly dispassionate account, Escobar examines the meteoric career of Pablo Escobar, a notorious Medellin cartel boss. To the world, the senior Escobar was a supervillain; to the author, he was Dad, and the son attempts to set the record straight about a man who had become myth long before his violent death. As a young criminal, Pablo Escobar stumbled into cocaine trafficking just as the demand for the white powder reached new highs in the U.S. Ruthlessness and business acumen gave him a lion’s share of the growing market. He often said that if he didn’t earn a million pesos by the time he was 30, he’d kill himself; in fact, by 30, he’d earned billions. For drug dealers, however, notoriety is the kiss of death; a bullet finished him on a Medellin rooftop in 1993, but not before he helped drag Colombia into chaos. His son grew up in a world of incredible privilege that included a private zoo on the family estate. Yet he also lived in isolation, his playmates a coterie of bodyguards. While focusing largely on his father, Escobar also includes the grim repercussions the cartel boss’s career had on his family. The matter-of-fact prose serves the material well—when one’s daily life is a surreal blur of excess and danger, there’s no need for embellishment. Escobar, now an architect in Argentina, certainly has an agenda, but he’s not oblivious to the lives cut short by his father’s death dealing. As the closing acknowledgement states: “To my father, who showed me what path not to take.” (Aug.)