My Books
I now sell signed copies of any of my books — $24 each — payable through several online payment apps. To purchase, please contact me at samquinones7@yahoo.com.
THE LEAST OF US: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
The Least of Us deepens the story of our nation’s opioid epidemic to include the spread of mass supplies of synthetic drugs (fentanyl and meth).
Fentanyl is the deadliest drug ever on US street. I break the major story of Mexican traffickers’ methamphetamine in catastrophic supplies that is now accompanied by waves of psychosis resembling schizophrenia, mental illness, homelessness and tent encampments across America.
“In a time when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like traffickers,” I write, “our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.”
Thus, half the book is about the small, unnoticed stories of Americans involved in community repair.
The story of a man who secretly kept a community center open for kids in a crumbling neighborhood that even the city thought it had closed. A woman retired from corporate America who opens a tattoo removal clinic where she removes the pimp’s brand from the inner thigh of a prostitute. A woman who adopts an infant and cares for the child’s bedridden mother rendered a vegetable by drug overdose – rooted in a casual promise she made years before.
Nominated as a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award for Best Nonfiction book of 2021, The Least of Us is “a marvelous achievement,” writes David Varno.
DREAMLAND: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic
The story that, I’m proud to say, awakened the nation to the country’s opioid epidemic.
In 2021, GQ Magazine selected Dreamland as one of the “50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century.”
Dreamland won a National Book Critics Circle award for the Best Nonfiction Book of 2015.
It was selected as one the Best 10 True-Crime Books of all time based on lists, surveys, and ratings of more than 90 million Goodreads readers. In 2019, Slate.com selected Dreamland as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last 25 years.
Dreamland is about the rise of the prescription drug OxyContin, a miraculous and extremely addictive painkiller pushed by pharmaceutical companies, and paralleled by the influx of black tar heroin from men from a small Mexican town who pioneered selling the drug with a method resembling pizza delivery.
In the small town of Portsmouth, Ohio, a swimming pool called Dreamland, the size of a football field, is the vital center of the community. Then it closes. Pills take its place. Addiction devastates Portsmouth, as it does hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America. Until, amid the grim, there is a glimmer of recovery.
DREAMLAND: (Young Adult edition)
A high-school version of Dreamland, prompted by repeated requests from parents and teachers.
It tells the Dreamland story in abridged fashion, leaving out some parts, but aiming always to illuminated kids and push them to discuss the issue of drug addiction that surrounds them. Used by many teachers.
I’m happy to do Zoom Q&A sessions with high school classes reading my books, especially Dreamland YA.
TRUE TALES FROM ANOTHER MEXICO: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx
My first book. From my 10 years freelance reporting from the margins of Mexico.
Chalino Sanchez became an underground singer of narcocorridos — drug ballads – until his murder made him a legend.
I spend time in Ciudad Juarez, investigating the murders of dozens of women, and with The Bronx – the rude boys of Mexico’s Congress — as they struggle with the meaning of rebellion.
The town of humble rancheros who invented the Michoacana popsicle, which poor Mexicans used to grow rich.
A colony of drag queens, Mexico’s outcasts, preparing for the countrys oldest gay beauty contest.
The lynching of two traveling salesmen.
I meet the man who went north to work, then returned to build his town’s first two-story house.
Aristeo Prado was a gunfighter and robber — a valiente trying to escape his past — when he was ambushed on a noontime street and died going for his gun.
A Oaxacan basketball team in Los Angeles run by a coach who fights to restore the purity of his sport that America has corrupted.
ANTONIO’S GUN AND DELFINO’S DREAM: True Tales of Mexican Migration
My second book. A collection of true stories about Mexican immigrants.
When his father is murdered by the town boss, Antonio Carrillo goes to the United States for a gun and an end to his humiliation.
Decades later, Delfino Juarez, the poorest kid in his town, treks through the desert to the United States, comes back and replaces his humiliating family shack with a two-story house.
Andres Bermudez gets rich growing tomatoes in California, then returns to run for mayor of his Mexican hometown. They say what happens later went to his head.
Tijuana music fans struggle like underground war resisters to forge one of Mexico’s great opera scenes.
A poor kid leaves everything in Georgia to become the Henry Ford of velvet painting in El Paso.
A Latino Joe McCarthy uses Mexican immigrants to bankrupt an L.A. suburb. Until those immigrants decide this kind of corruption was why they’d left Mexico.
The season of a high-school soccer team in a southwest Kansas meatpacking town.
Finally, I visit drug-trafficking Mennonite settlements in northern Mexico. Asking the wrong questions forced me, finally, to leave Mexico.