This a great book, one of the best Ive read this year. It hits you in the head, makes you think hard about the events conveyed between its pages, but it packs an even harder emotional wallop. I felt such sadness and fierce heartache for the 26 men who stumbled into the Devils Highway and the brutal loss of the 14 who didnt make it and the tortuous way they stumbled, for hour on endless hour, into the ultimately merciful embrace of death.Urrea has a poets gift for language, alternating long, lyrical passages with short, abrupt declarative sentences that are brutal as a slap in the face. He has the sociologists gift for conveying the complex nature of the mangy beast that is US/Mexican border relations, he has even a fine enough sensitivity to note that the poor workers who came to the US dreaming of quick cash and real work were marginalized and disenfranchised before they even crossed the border. He also has considerable novelistic gifts, he can paint a scene, move action from place to place and recall dialogue masterfully. It would be easy to relate these events and come up with some liberal jeremiad that shouted out for justice for these poor, sad son of a bitches that attempt this crossing. And he does that, he screams to the top of his lungs to offer these guys some lasting relevance and resonance, to get inside their sun-baked skulls as they fell into the Valley of Muerte. But he also shows a non-judgmental for the Coyotes, immigration workers and others that fill this sad tale. They run the gamut from wholly sympathetic, to ones capable of arousing our begrudging admiration, to villainous money-grubbing traffickers who dont shed a tear over any human bones left in the Arizona desert.There is so much here. The colorful characters. The fateful chain of mistakes made by the hapless coyotes. The relentless, heroic trudging through the vast, inhuman, sinister and hallucinatory desert. A work of near genius, uncompromising, poetic, idiosyncratic and imminently worth reading.

SIX WORD REVIEW: The six stages of heat exhaustion.

The border between the U.S. and Mexico is a mythical, brutal place. A no-man's land that men often cross through, or die in. In May 2014, two dozen men entered "the Devil's Highway", a stretch of desert between Sonora in Mexico and Yuma, Arizona in America. Fourteen of these men did not come out alive.This is not an uncommon fate for "undocumented entrants"; hundreds of migrants die every year trying to gain entry to America. (1,954 people died crossing the border between 1998 and 2004*. Heat stroke, dehydration, and hypothermia are the leading causes of death*. The only thing that makes the "Yuma 14" special is the number of people who died at once.This book tells the story of the Yuma 14 as an archetypal border crossing tragedy. The author treats all characters with the utmost respect, from the migrants to the coyotes who eventually abandoned them, to the border patrol. Even as a Mexican-American with understandable bias in favor of those south of the border, he manages to tell a completely empathic story in which everyone is treated humanely. That is, except for the U.S. border policy itself, which is destructive, xenophobic, and racist. If you were to listen to a certain small-handed Presidential candidate, there is a flood of "illegals" coming across the border to rape your wife, steal your wallet and your job. This would be absolutely laughable if it wasn't so sad how many people believe it so readily. As much data as there is in this book and as much time one can take formulating an argument about how immigrantsboth legal and illegalactually benefit the U.S. economy (which they do), the primary lesson from this book is that we are all humans and deserve to be treated as such. Don't let bigots dehumanize "the other". Embrace what everyone shares in common, rather than creating division. There's a lot to talk about when it comes to the Yuma 14 and the border in general; here are some useful links:Interactive Map of the Yuma 14's travelsOriginal NYTimes article about the Yuma 14Bill Moyers interview, how the author came to sympathize with Border Patrol agentsDevil's Highway: An Evening with Autho Luis UrreaUS-Mexico Border Policy Report, does a great job of highlighting the problems of the current policy and provides practical solutions