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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
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Politics & government

EXIT WOUNDS

Ieva Jusionyte

American Guns, Mexican Lives, and the Vicious Circle of Violence

Turns the familiar story of trafficking across the US-Mexico border on its head, looking at firearms smuggled south from the United States to Mexico and their ricochet effects.

American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarks on a journey in the opposite direction - following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico. An expert work of narrative nonfiction, EXIT WOUNDS provides a rare, intimate look into the world of firearms trafficking and urges us to understand the effects of lax U.S. gun laws abroad. Jusionyte masterfully weaves the gripping stories of people who live and work with guns north and south of the border: a Mexican businessman who smuggles guns for protection, a teenage girl turned trained assassin, two U.S. federal agents trying to stop gun traffickers, and a journalist who risks his life to report on organized crime. Based on years of fieldwork, EXIT WOUNDS expands current debates about guns in America, grappling with U.S. complicity in violence on both sides of the border. Ieva Jusionyte is an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University. A former paramedic, Harvard Radcliffe and Fulbright fellow, she is the author of award-winning Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border.

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Book Published 2024-04-16 by University of California Press

Comments

A remarkable and chilling book. Jusionyte writes with urgency, brilliance, and grace.

In this absolutely riveting account, Jusionyte follows US guns south across the border to uncover the stories of the people who buy, smuggle, use, seize, and sometimes even recycle them. Brilliantly told and bravely researched, EXIT WOUNDS shows the full devastation of this flood of American-made steel - not only for the hundreds of thousands of people left dead, maimed, or missing but also for families, communities, and Mexican society.

Jusionyte directs our eyes beyond the pervasive political rhetoric about walls, razor wire, and buoys in the Rio Grande to the hidden world of gun smuggling. Heartbreaking, sobering, and troubling, EXIT WOUNDS is an urgent call to those who want to fully understand the complexities and synergy between the United States and Mexico. Superbly written and impeccably researched, this book is simply exceptional.

EXIT WOUNDS is a harrowing, intimate, and profoundly illuminating journey through the asymmetrical exchanges of guns, drugs, money, people, and the stories about them that together constitute the all-American borderlands between the United States and Mexico. Humanizing a host of urgent social issues, this is a vital book for our times.

It is a must-read in a conversation that is surely to continue heating up.

Compelling, disturbing, and powerful.

An extraordinarily brave researcher, [Jusionyte] spent years getting to know gun runners, members of critical gangs, law enforcement officials on both sides of the border, and the journalists and community members who have witnessed the terrible toll of U.S.-made guns in Mexico.In her epilogue, Jusionyte makes suggestions for enlightened policies to mitigate the plague of gun violence in Mexico and the 'border crisis' caused by people fleeing repression and extortion.