In Bruce Porter's 1993 nonfiction book Blow, the life of George Jung--his
rise from high school dropout in the working-class Boston suburb of Weymouth,
Massachusetts, to major 1970s trafficker of Colombian cocaine with $60 million
stashed away in a Panamanian bank, and his subsequent earthshaking fall--is
treated mostly as the bizarre, occasionally exciting story it is. Porter bases
his meat-and-potatoes journalistic account on extensive interviews with this
notorious American cousin of the Medellín drug cartel and with the police
officers and FBI agents who busted him. The book's chief fascination lies in its
spirited recounting of the hundreds of little twists and turns Jung's life took