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George Jung, the real-life star of Bruce Porter's nonfiction work, Blow: How a Smalltown Boy Made $100 Million With the Medillin Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All, has a lot in common with the heroes of Horatio Alger novels: he was a man who started out modestly, but through determination, perseverance, and hard-work managed to build a huge financial empire. There is one slight difference between George and the characters in Alger's stories, however. Jung is a convicted felon, and his business was the distribution of illegal drugs.

Author Bruce Porter does a remarkable job of giving a detailed account of George's meteoric rise and fall. George grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in New England. He enjoyed some success in sports and the social scene, but his career options seemed limited; that is, until he moved to California during the drug revolution and decided that he would try his hand at being a dealer. This decision was a turning point in his life, and it became clear early on that George had found his true calling. He quickly developed an extremely lucrative trade, but, ironically enough, things did not really take off until he was caught and sent to a Massachusetts prison. There he met the infamous drug smuggler Carlos Lehder - then just a small time crook - and began to develop a relationship that would lead to one of the most successful careers in the history of crime.

The book offers a fascinating look into the depravity-filled world of drug dealing in the 1970s and 1980s, and - as is the case with a good 1930s gangster movie - there is a certain amount of voyeuristic entertainment gained by peeking into this illicit world of cars, women, and lots and lots AND LOTS of money. There are some fairly exciting vignettes in which George narrowly survives run-ins with his criminal competitors or escapes the clutches of the police. The book also is worthwhile because it gives the witness a firsthand account of the Columbian drug trade. The notorious Pablo Escobar makes a couple of appearances, and it is interesting to see how his rise was in some way linked to George's.

Nevertheless, the book has a couple of problems which prevent it from being a real must-read. First, it suffers from a few slow parts. I hate to put the blame on Porter, who for the most part does an excellent job, but perhaps the book could have benefited from a little more careful editing on his part.

The second problem is a little more basic and far more damning. George Jung, the hero of the book, is not very likeable. Sure, he possesses a certain amount of charisma and flair, but I for one could not get past this small fact: he was a drug dealer! Regardless of your personal feelings about drugs and legalization, George Jung was a key player in a business that was directly responsible for endangering the lives of law enforcement officials, completely corrupting the governments of Columbia, Peru, and Panama, and - near the end of his career - introducing crack cocaine into people's neighborhoods. Still, the book is very readable, and I would say that, all in all, George Jung's rise and fall is a vicarious roller-coaster ride worth taking.

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(Submitted 7/27/01 by Cleveland lawyer Julio.)