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Product Description NAMED A TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 BY NPR and THE WASHINGTON POSTWINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN CURRENT INTERESTFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NONFICTION AWARDThe 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. Review “[ The Line Becomes a River] lays bare, in damning light, the casual brutality of the system, how unjust laws and private prisons and a militarized border have shattered families and mocked America’s myths about itself.” —New York Times Book Review “[Cantú] proves to be an astounding writer with this memoir for the moment.” —Entertainment Weekly “When the political rhetoric around the complex, ruggedly beautiful and scarred U.S.-Mexico borderlands is reduced to talk of a 30-foot concrete wall, it’s time to take a more nuanced look at our southern border... The Line Becomes a River veers away from propaganda and stereotypes and into the wild deserts and mountains, and, especially, the hearts and minds of the people who traverse the increasingly militarized borderlands.” —The Wall Street Journal “A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything.” —Esquire“[Cantú's] beautifully written account of a life between nations cuts through the politics surrounding “the wall” to probe what’s really at stake.” —O, the Oprah Magazine “A book that whips across your face like a sandstorm, embedding bits of the desert into your skin that, like it or not, you’ll carry forward.” —San Francisco Chronicle“Exquisitely nuanced...explains the conflicted journey of a border crosser with an impressive level of compassion, self-reflection, and conviction.” —NBC News“If you read one book on immigration this year, choose The Line Becomes a River.” —Denver Post“The wall that separates us is high and wide, but as Cantú’s memoir shows us, there is still a way around it.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “The best book on immigration you will read this year…honest, gripping and wonderfully written.” —Mother Jones “By coming to better understand Cantú's fixation with the border, readers of his book are brought into that suspension, prompted -- if not outright required -- to experience what it's like to exist in-between, knowing no amount of politics or prayer can give a hard question easy answers.” —CNN“An intense and captivating memoir of dreams, divisions, and death at the border.” –Christian Science Monitor “Read enough op-eds and takes and tweets about the border, and you can start to forget that it’s a real place….Francisco Cantú has written an insistently humane book, or maybe just a human one….It’s an exploration of how the border feels, and what happens to the people who get caught in its gears.” —Bookforum “A poetic and empathetic work whose message — the border is built on an imaginary line, but its impact on the people who cross it, or can't, is real — feels more urgent this year than ever.” —Salon“Raw and timely confessional… A striking picture of the unsparing borderlands.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune“Beautiful, eloquent and timely...[Cantú's] your correspondent if you want the real story.” —Cleveland