The Guy Page has reported on numerous books over the years, but this is the first time we’re recommending one. “God’s Middle Finger” (Free Press, $15), by Richard Grant, a British travel writer who barely survived a terminal case of curiosity.
Grant describes narco-infused pockets of life in the Sierra Madre, a mountain range that starts at the U.S. border and sinks 900 miles into Mexico. Amid extraordinary beauty, he also sees a sometimes nightmarish netherworld where Apaches were able to hide out into the 1930s, where rancid machismo runs unchecked, where refusing a drink can be a capital offense, where rape can amount to the only proposal of marriage some women get.
Grant ends up running for his life from a bunch of drunks who apparently wanted to kill him for the fun of it. The book is a great adventure, or misadventure. For much of his journey it seemed that maybe he had been overserved on caution by his trip advisers. Then again, when he finally let his guard down, it came at precisely the wrong time.
The book also notes that Tribune reporter Paul Salopek is one of the few people known to have traveled the length of the range on horseback. Salopek had not seen the book and thus couldn’t make a judgment but said he remembers his trip with fondness — not to say he didn’t see many of the same bad things. But he also enjoyed the company of “ordinary dryland farmers, prospectors, lumberjacks, neolithic shamans and cowboys.” Salopek e-mailed from South Africa: “We all go into the Sierra looking for different things, and generally, we tend to find them.”