The Hollywood Kid

(El Niño de Hollywood) is a revelation. As they track a single tragic life, Los Hermanos Martínez delve deep into El Salvador's tortured labyrinth, into the macabre working of the Mara Salvatruches, into the sinister consequence of failed US policies, and in the process recover what Neil Smith called the lost history of the American Empire. This is reportage made literature, darkness made light, and one of the most important books of investigative journalism I've read in years. -- Junot Diaz
As the poet William Blake famously put it, 'general forms have their vitality in particulars, and every particular is a Man'. The Martinez D'Aubuisson brothers' beautifully written account of the life and death of the feared gangster El Niño de Hollywood, based on hours and hours of interviews with him and those close to him, starkly reveals the underlying dynamics of the Central American gang phenomenon in vivid and insightful detail. -- Dennis Rodgers, author of Global Gangs
The graceful, incisive writing lifts The Beast from being merely an impressive feat of reportage into the realm of literature. Mr. Martínez has produced something that is an honorable successor to enduring works like George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier or Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives. -- Larry Rohter * New York Times *
Martínez dives into the underworld of his subjects, navigating barrios that police won't enter, spending days and nights with gang members. His methods resemble war reporting and his prose is cinematic . The collection's strength lies in his ability to write the hell out of his material. Like Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family, it skimps on statistics and analysis, instead relying on description alone to create a world that captures the reader and doesn't let her go. One of the stories, 'El Niño Hollywood's Death Foretold,' evokes Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Like the beloved Colombian writer, Martínez pens scenes that are suspenseful, moving, and vivid. -- Sarah Esther Maslin * New Republic *
Óscar Martínez deserves praise not only for his efforts, and for what he writes about, but because he writes so very well. * New Yorker *
Martínez's credentials for writing about this ignored human tide are impeccable: his first book, The Beast, drew on eight trips clinging to the roof of the infamous migrants' train through Mexico, chronicling their desperation in grippingly graphic detail. His new book, A History of Violence, takes a step back to explore what the migrants heading to the US are running away from the unflinching cameos it paints offer a chilling portrait of corruption, unimaginable brutality and impunity. * Financial Times *
A powerful storyteller and his approach to investigative journalism is closer to anthropological immersion. * Columbia Journalism Review *
One of the bravest writers in Latin America, if not the world. He's also one of the best * Dazed and Confused *
Masterfully told. -- Belen Fernandez * NACLA *
The Hollywood Kid is a gripping read, thoroughly researched and dramatically conveyed. -- Hilary Goodfriend * Jacobin *
The Martínez brothers' book tells the story of an MS-13 hitman known as the Hollywood Kid. He was recruited to the gang in El Salvador by a twenty-year-old former member of the National Police, escaped the civil war to California, was deported in 1994, then began his own clica (clique, or gang chapter) in Salvadoran coffee country. -- Rachel Nolan * NYRB *