Dec 20

Dec 20 Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling

About the book

Author: Jason De León
Publisher: Viking

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

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Bookshop.org (print) | Libro.fm (audio)

My Review

Soldiers and Kings wasn’t even on my radar until it won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. But that was right around the time I got hungry for nonfiction again, so I borrowed it from the library and decided to see why it had earned the accolade.

Now I know: This book is an incredible feat of anthropology and human connection. In it, De León chronicles the near-decade he spent getting to know a group of Honduran human smugglers, those hired by migrants to help them cross the border (not to be confused with human traffickers, who take people against their will). Unlike with most books about the migrant crisis, which of course focus on the migrants, De León’s generous, tender focus on the smugglers he befriended shows us a side of the equation rarely considered and often dismissed. These people are not (all) rich, cruel crime lords. They are often fleeing situations just as impossible and dangerous as the people who hire them, and they too have dreams and families and desperate hope.

I didn’t think that the execution of this book was perfect; despite being organized into chapters, it felt a bit unstructured, and different people and incidents bled together in my mind. This made it feel a little longer than my attention span wanted it to be. That also could have been a symptom of me doing most of the book on audio (although I did think De León did a great job narrating). But I don’t think that’s enough to take away from the accomplishment of the work De León has done. There were several deserving books nominated for the NBA, and this was certainly one of them — no complaints from me on it earning the medal.