Land of Opportunity

William M. Adler is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and the Texas Observer. In addition to Land of Opportunity, he has written two other books of narrative nonfiction: Mollie’s Job, which follows the flight of a single factory job from the US to Mexico over the course of fifty years; and The Man Who Never Died, a biography of the labor martyr Joe Hill.

• ForewordCast of Selected CharactersIntroduction: HomecomingChapter One: Land of CottonChapter Two: Washing Windows in a BlizzardChapter Three: Heaven DustChapter Four: “BJ, Why Don’t You Start Selling Crack?”Chapter Five: Cool Hand LarryChapter Six: Moving Like LightningChapter Seven: Marlow’s One-StopChapter Eight: “Good-bye, Dixie Land”Chapter Nine: Too Windy for Tear GasChapter Ten: “We Rich, Goddammit!”Chapter Eleven: “Fuck It, I’ll Fix Him”Chapter Twelve: All in the FamilyChapter Thirteen: A Tale of Two CitiesChapter Fourteen: As Close As Brothers GetEpilogue: Nothing to LoseAfterwordAcknowledgmentsNotesSelected Bibliography

“With graceful restraint, Adler shows us that the war on drugs is not a war of the county against those who would bring it down by rejecting its values and grasping at easy money. It is a war of a country against itself, against its history of racism, against its own values of materialism and lack of concern for all its people. “—The Washington Post