Sam Quinones

Winner of the NBCC Award for General NonfictionNamed on Amazon's Best Books of the Year 2015--Michael Botticelli, U.S. Drug Czar ( Politico ) Favorite Book of the Year--Angus Deaton, Nobel Prize Economics ( Bloomberg / WSJ ) Best Books of 2015--Matt Bevin, Governor of Kentucky ( WSJ ) Books of the Year--Slate.com's 10 Best Books of 2015-- Entertainment Weekly 's 10 Best Books of 2015 --Buzzfeed's 19 Best Nonfiction Books of 2015--The Daily Beast's Best Big Idea Books of 2015-- Seattle Times ' Best Books of 2015-- Boston Globe 's Best Books of 2015-- St. Louis Post-Dispatch 's Best Books of 2015-- The Guardian 's The Best Book We Read All Year--Audible's Best Books of 2015-- Texas Observer 's Five Books We Loved in 2015--Chicago Public Library's Best Nonfiction Books of 2015From a small town in Mexico to the boardrooms of Big Pharma to main streets nationwide, an explosive and shocking account of addiction in the heartland of America.In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field; named Dreamland, it became the vital center of the community. Now, addiction has devastated Portsmouth, as it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America--addiction like no other the country has ever faced. How that happened is the riveting story of Dreamland .With a great reporter's narrative skill and the storytelling ability of a novelist, acclaimed journalist Sam Quinones weaves together two classic tales of capitalism run amok whose unintentional collision has been catastrophic. The unfettered prescribing of pain medications during the 1990s reached its peak in Purdue Pharma's campaign to market OxyContin, its new, expensive--extremely addictive--miracle painkiller. Meanwhile, a massive influx of black tar heroin--cheap, potent, and originating from one small county on Mexico's west coast, independent of any drug cartel--assaulted small town and mid-sized cities across the country, driven by a brilliant, almost unbeatable marketing and distribution system. Together these phenomena continue to lay waste to communities from Tennessee to Oregon, Indiana to New Mexico.Introducing a memorable cast of characters--pharma pioneers, young Mexican entrepreneurs, narcotics investigators, survivors, and parents--Quinones shows how these tales fit together. Dreamland is a revelatory account of the corrosive threat facing America and its heartland.

Apple Best Books of 2021 * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction * Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal * Shortlisted for the Zocalo Book PrizeFrom the New York Times bestselling author of Dreamland , a searing follow-up that explores the terrifying next stages of the opioid epidemic and the quiet yet ardent stories of community repair.Sam Quinones traveled from Mexico to main streets across the U.S. to create Dreamland , a groundbreaking portrait of the opioid epidemic that awakened the nation. As the nation struggled to put back the pieces, Quinones was among the first to see the dangers that lay synthetic drugs and a new generation of kingpins whose product could be made in Magic Bullet blenders. In fentanyl, traffickers landed a painkiller a hundred times more powerful than morphine. They laced it into cocaine, meth, and counterfeit pills to cause tens of thousands of deaths―at the same time as Mexican traffickers made methamphetamine cheaper and more potent than ever, creating, Sam argues, swaths of mental illness and a surge in homelessness across the United States.Quinones hit the road to investigate these new threats, discovering how addiction is exacerbated by consumer-product corporations. “In a time when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like traffickers,” he writes, “our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.” Amid a landscape of despair, Quinones found hope in those embracing the forgotten and ignored, illuminating the striking truth that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable.Weaving analysis of the drug trade into stories of humble communities, The Least of Us delivers an unexpected and awe-inspiring response to the call that shocked the nation in Sam Quinones’s award-winning Dreamland .

As an adult book, Sam Quinones's Dreamland took the world by storm, winning the NBCC Award for General Nonfiction and hitting at least a dozen Best Book of the Year lists. Now, adapted for the first time for a young adult audience, this compelling reporting explains the roots of the current opiate crisis.In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field; named Dreamland, it became the vital center of the community. Now, addiction has devastated Portsmouth, as it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America. How that happened is the riveting story of Dreamland. Quinones explains how the rise of the prescription drug OxyContin, a miraculous and extremely addictive painkiller pushed by pharmaceutical companies, paralleled the massive influx of black tar heroin--cheap, potent, and originating from one small county on Mexico's west coast, independent of any drug cartel.Introducing a memorable cast of characters--pharmaceutical pioneers, young Mexican entrepreneurs, narcotics investigators, survivors, teens, and parents--Dreamland is a revelatory account of the massive threat facing America and its heartland.

Chalino Sanchez was a migrant worker who became a underground singer of narcocorridos -- ballads about drug smugglers - until his murder, which remains unsolved. Then he became a legend.Two traveling salesmen plied their wares in a sweltering small town. The next day they were hanging from the town's bandstand lynched by a mob, a thousand strong.Hailed as a cult classic, True Tales From Another Mexico takes us to a colony of drag queens -- jotos -- preparing for Mexico's oldest gay beauty contest.We see how a bunch of humble rancheros invented the Michoacana popsicle, and a business model that poor people used to grow rich.We follow a Oaxacan Indian basketball team in Los Angeles as its coach fights to restore the purity of his sport, besmirched in America.Aristeo Prado was a gunfighter and robber -- a valiente trying to escape his past -- when he was ambushed on a noontime street and died going for his gun.Telenovelas, once a propaganda vehicle of Mexico's one-party state, flourished with political change and touched topics -- corruption, drug trafficking and poverty -- that once were prohibited.In Nueva Jerusalen, a theocratic village run by an excommunicated Catholic priest, residents receive voting instructions from the Virgin of Guadalupe.We enter the Bronx - the rude boys in the PRI wing of Mexico's Congress -- as they struggle with the meaning of rebellion.Some of these stories are strange and exotic. More often, though, they are from mainstream though ignored parts of Mexican life.True Tales from Another Mexico are the stories of people whose stories never get told.

Sam Quinones's first book, True Tales From Another Mexico , was acclaimed for the way it peered into the corners of that country for its larger truths and complexities. Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream , Quinones's second collection of nonfiction tales, does the same for one of the most important issues of our the migration of Mexicans to the United States. Quinones has covered the world of Mexican immigrants for the last thirteen years--from Chicago to Oaxaca, Michoacan to southeast Los Angeles, Tijuana to Texas. Along the way, he has uncovered stories that help illuminate all that Mexicans seek when they come north, how they change their new country, and are changed by it. Here are the stories of the Henry Ford of velvet painting in Ciudad Juarez, the emergence of opera in Tijuana, the bizarre goings-on in the L.A. suburb of South Gate, and of the drug-addled colonies of Old World German Mennonites in Chihuahua. Through it all winds the tale of Delfino Juarez, a young construction worker, and modern-day Huckleberry Finn, who had to leave his village to change it.

From National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Sam Quinones, the story of a demanding instrument, the determined people who play it, and the hope they offer a fractured nation. The tuba's sound is mighty, emerging, it seems, from deep in the human body. Very little music has, up until recently, been written to play to its strengths. The best the tuba seems to promise is a seat at the back of the band. No stadium shows, no Internet adulation. And yet, this horn-the youngest of all brass instruments-has captured the hearts of an inspired group of musicians ever since its invention in 1835. In The Perfect Tuba, Sam Quinones embarks on a trek to get to know American tubists. He tells the astounding stories of two men who set out to replicate the “perfect tuba,” an instrument made by York & Sons in the 1930s and never since equaled; of Big Bill Bell, whose 1950s album rearranged the tuba landscape; and of Arnold Jacobs, a tuba guru at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who studied the physiology of breathing and offered rune-like nuggets of wisdom to his legions of students. Quinones also takes us through the tuba scenes of New Orleans, Orlando, Knoxville, New York City, and, most importantly, Roma, Texas, a dusty town in the Rio Grande Valley where a visionary high school marching band director fashioned a program that now regularly wins state championships and sends its students off to college. After nearly a decade on the front lines of America's battle with drug addiction, Sam Quinones delivers another story of our nation, this time brought together by the transformative power of shared joy and humble achievement.

Great nonfiction stories by authors in the Tell Your True Tale writing workshop at East Los Angeles library. Stories of a vet returning home from Vietnam; of a janitor in Houston trying to find her children in Mexico; of braceros finding their way north and back home again; of a man learning confidence as he woos a woman; of a bus rider in Los Angeles; of a mariachi singing for a family on Christmas Eve. The Tell Your True Tale workshop, devised by journalist/author Sam Quinones teaches the basics of writing and storytelling by getting new writers to connect with the tales in their own lives.

True stories by new authors from East Los Angeles, in the Tell Your True Tale workshop by journalist Sam Quinones and sponsored by East Los Angeles public library

Stunning stories from the ninth Tell Your True Tale workshop run by journalist Sam Quinones and the LA County Library

The fourth volume of stories by writers in journalist Sam Quinones' workshop Tell Your True Tale

¿Cuál es la otra cara del México moderno, democratizador y abierto al libre comercio? ¿Qué vemos los mexicanos cuando nos miramos al espejo?Del otro lado hay un México oculto, que Sam Quinones plasma en este libro al mezclar la observación aguda con una narrativa inteligente y entrevistas diversas. En ahí donde se encuentran los reyes de la paleta de Tocumbo, los tepiteños, la gente de Chipícuaro, valientes indómitos como Aristeo Prado, las mujeres que van a Ciudad Juárez en busca de un futuro y encuentran la muerte: personas que tienen el corazón para imaginar algo diferente y huyen instintivamente de la herencia del paternalismo gubernamental.En este libro se entretejen historias cuyos escenarios son las frontera norte o el sur de California, y con personajes como el narcosanto Jesús Malverde y el legendario Chalino Sánchez, cuyas canciones dieron popularidad al narcorrrido. Todas estas historias dicen algo central sobre nuestro país, su complejidad y la manera que está cambiando. Este es el México del presente (¿y del futuro?)…