Dirty Gold

by Jay Weaver et al. (PublicAffairs, $28)

No wonder some South American cartels consider gold a more attractive investment than cocaine, said Jonathan Green in The New York Times. As this “engrossing” account by a team of Miami Herald reporters shows, gold is far more lucrative and more easily sold to legitimate U.S. businesses. The losers in this racket are the pit-mine workers—often women and children “forced to toil beneath toxic landscapes, eking out trace gold in dark, airless mines that collapse and snuff out life.”