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Smokescreen: A True Adventure

Smokescreen: A True Adventure

List Price: $15.00
Your Price: $10.20
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: How America Got High
Review: Following the modern day swashbuckler, Allen Long, on his adventurous trips in the smuggling business gives the reader a lesson in how North America's appetite for marijuana was fed for the decade after the 60's.

The author Sabbag concentrates on the fast-paced smuggling business, denying the reader insight into the characters risking life and limb to become the Kings of Pot. As a result, the whole book is a sustained flurry of activity. This isn't a bad thing, as the lack of character development creates the atmosphere I imagine the protagonist Long lived in - one of many contacts, and never being sure who they really are and who is going to play an important part later on in the story.

I walked away from this book with the distinct impression that smugglers, perhaps more than anything else, are adrenaline junkies. Stepping up drug interdiction efforts is to people like Long what one more school bus was to Evil Knievel; the bigger the risk, the bigger the rush.

I'm not giving anything away when I say the book ends with the quote "this would make a great movie." Perhaps that is why over half of Americans still support this War on Drugs - it's so entertaining.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Loaded
Review: I guess they changed the title of this book at some point -- the copy I got from the library was called "Loaded, A Misadventure In the Marijuana Trade". At any rate, forget any tepid reviews by "professional" reviewers who somehow feel this story wasn't quite up to their literary standards. The book is just a flat out great read and had me laughing out loud many times. A hilarious but cautionary tale with a serious ending, the adventures of pot smuggler Allen Long are so far out there that you know they must be true. Any baby boomer who did time in the counter culture of the 60s and 70s, or who is familiar with the drug culture of that era will get a big kick out of this book, and I'd think many younger readers would enjoy it as well.

Allen Long was a man of immense ability, ambition and personal charm, as well as a natural leader... who also loved to smoke the best pot he could find. He probably would have been successful in any field but some people need to take the road less travelled. Long was the man responsible for Columbian marijuana coming to the US (millions of tons of it). I got the impression that he was as much a crusader for marijuana as he was in it for the money, at least in the beginning. The first part of the book is almost like a Cheech & Chong screenplay, with multi-million dollar deals and hair-raising scenarios being improvised by people who stay as stoned-out as possible at all times; but by the end the gangsters have moved in, the trade has turned to cocaine, and the intial hippie-capitalist spirit has vanished, to be replaced with cutthroat competition, greed and violence. Long never has the heart to become a gangster and is eventually squeezed out of the business by the more ruthless and hungry Latin Americans. It's a look at a particular part of era that hasn't often been told, and certainly never told in such a thoroughly entertaining manner. Thumbs up all the way.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: All you workaday nonentities- here's your fantasy -
Review: I know Allen Long and think that he must be one of the most adventurous men I've ever met. This book is his tale of his younger years, running the gambit on the Mary Jane trail; taking the risks and living the life that goes with it. What makes this book so awesome, is that Allen actually did live this book! This isn't a story to be told to wow anyone; Allen is a wealthy man today and doesn't need to impress anyone. This is just a good book about something that we all would have probably loved to try back in our younger years if we just had the balls...Allen has those balls you wished you had. A must read if you want to re-live some fantasy's and live vicariously through Allen Long!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: TOP NOTCH READING
Review: I know Allen Long and think that he must be one of the most adventurous men I've ever met. This book is his tale of his younger years, running the gambit on the Mary Jane trail; taking the risks and living the life that goes with it. What makes this book so awesome, is that Allen actually did live this book! This isn't a story to be told to wow anyone; Allen is a wealthy man today and doesn't need to impress anyone. This is just a good book about something that we all would have probably loved to try back in our younger years if we just had the balls...Allen has those balls you wished you had. A must read if you want to re-live some fantasy's and live vicariously through Allen Long!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Breaking into the pot business the hard way
Review: If you liked Sabbag's previous work "Snowblind", you'll enjoy this one every bit as much. Tracking the career of an erstwhile smuggler, Sabbag gives us a fascinating and humorous look into the would-be criminal's misadventures. The author has a delightful way of describing the characters the smuggler meets along the way, making this book a real page-turner. Highly recommended.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Breaking into the pot business the hard way
Review: If you liked Sabbag's previous work "Snowblind", you'll enjoy this one every bit as much. Tracking the career of an erstwhile smuggler, Sabbag gives us a fascinating and humorous look into the would-be criminal's misadventures. The author has a delightful way of describing the characters the smuggler meets along the way, making this book a real page-turner. Highly recommended.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Action; adventure; career advice?
Review: Overall a very good read. A little slow and wordy out of the gate but once the action starts it goes through to the end. Reads like a blockbuster movie script. Found myself thinking about a career change midway through the book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: All you workaday nonentities- here's your fantasy -
Review: Surely no review is going to do justice to this fairly insane, eminently thriulling book. Sabbag goes back to the halycon days of the early 70's, and recreates drug smuggling with the most erudite of novelistic verve! That's a feat- this is 30 years later we're covering, and to place us, the bored and incompetent reader, back in that perfervid time is a feat of highwire journalistic daring. Like "Blow," that good movie and even better book, this is a hale and debonair look at that most Aemrican of enterprises, the upright white guy's ascent into and then descent out of the murky, sinister, yet grievously partying world of international big-stakes durg smuggling. Sabbag is clear that Long is our protagonist, our stand-in for all the pusillanimous white boy dreamers who toked but never sold, and his style is pure Boy's Life, rippling adventure and shifting fortunes interspersed like a Hollywood thriller. Corporate America, that global behemoth, is a study in amoral, unethical gamesplaying, so spare the world any qualms about the ultimate worth of this bad boy's bucaneering. The drugs many imbibe in this country are a mark of our depravity, yet also a condemnation of our listless and purposeless social inertia. Sabbag's book will fail to register a single sine wave as social commentary, since it is too kinetic and jargon-free to qualify as stolid academic commentary, but this is our ultimate failing as a society. This book is directly connected to our vital communal adrenaline, and stands as a wholly pleasurable celebration of human initiative, and then earned senescence (Long is an unjailed, unmarked family man at the end, unlike the haunted hipster of "Blow"). Whatever your moral positioning, this is a male beach read for the ages.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Quintessential reading if you like this genre...
Review: The author Robert Sabbag has this scene nailed down. I thought I had read, or maybe even lived it all. No sir. This book "jacks it up" to new levels of adreneline pumping. These characters had balls. Big ones. And it is really fun to read about people like that.

The opening, where a DC-3 is barely making it to the Columbian border at sunrise after a few days of flight is second to none. One of the best and tightest openings to any book I have ever read. Where is the movie???

Thank you, Mr. Sabbag

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Loaded; what an adventure!!
Review: This book reads like a novel, only better. Very fast paced and always holds your interest, if you find the "70's pot smuggling scene" interesting. These characters seem like pirates, like a fantasy. Very easy to read. I liked it.


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