Introduction

NAMED A TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 BY NPR and THE WASHINGTON POST
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NONFICTION AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN CURRENT INTEREST

The instant New York Times bestseller, "A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything." --Esquire

For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of February 2018: These days, mention of “the Border” stirs both imagination and emotion, what you see and feel depending on how you perceive the world. But how many of us understand this real-world interzone where actual borders shift and bleed, and hard scenes of death, drug smuggling, and human suffering unfold daily? The son of a park ranger, Francisco Cantú grew up in the southwest. When he joined the Border Patrol, he became witness to the stark realities of the desert, where the obligations of his job weighed heavy against his sense of humanity. Dark material for sure, but Cantú is a good no-nonsense writer, and his direct, stoic prose makes The Line Becomes a River a weighty and timely document on one of our most divisive arguments. --Jon Foro, Amazon Book Review

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