Book Marks: Escobar's son tells his tale

30 August 2016 - 10:49 By Andrew Donaldson

The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer (HarperCollins) THIS YEAR'S CELEBRITY TELL-ALLThe Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer (HarperCollins)SCHUMER is America's filthiest female stand-up comic, and this hilarious overshare of a book - thinly disguised as a bog-standard rise-to- stardom account - is brimful with drink, barfing, more drink, weird sex, more drink, blackouts, yet more sex, binge-sex, binge-drinking, binge-barfing. Gloriously unhinged fun.THE ISSUESpare a thought, if you can, for Juan Pablo Escobar; being the son of a Columbian drug kingpin and mass murderer was not without problems, as he details in his forthcoming book, Pablo Escobar: My Father (Ebury Press). Juan Pablo was seven when he discovered what his father did for a living. "That was what he did," he told the London Sunday Times. "He never had any problem with me knowing about it."It would have been useless trying to hide the truth from the boy. His certainly was a gilded childhood. By the time he was 11 he had 30 motorcycles. He had his own apartment at 13. The family's wealth was staggering. At one point, Escobar's Medellín cartel was spending $2500 a month on elastic bands - just to bundle the cash.All of it was lost after Escobar was killed in 1993, his assets seized by the Colombian government - and rival gangsters. Juan Pablo, then 16 and marked for assassination by the Cali cartel, fled Colombia with his mother, and eventually settled in Buenos Aires. "It was difficult for us not to be surrounded by servants," he said. "We used to have people doing stuff all the time but we were totally alone when we arrived - we didn't know anyone, there was nobody to help, so it wasn't easy to start again."Today Juan Pablo works as an architect and industrial designer - and is researching a second book about his father which, he said, will "end the Pablo Escobar chapter in our life". He was dismissive of dramatisations of his father's life, like the hit Netflix TV series Narcos, which he felt merely glamourised the drug smuggler culture.Publisher's Weekly was enthusiastic about the book: "While focusing largely on his father, Escobar also includes the grim repercussions the cartel boss's career had on his family. The matter-of-fact prose serves the material well - when one's daily life is a surreal blur of excess and danger, there's no need for embellishment."CRASH COURSEThere's quite a buzz in American self-help book circles about Phyllis Korkki's The Big Thing: How to Complete Your Creative Project Even if You're a Lazy, Self-Doubting Procrastinator Like Me (Harper). The New York Times's review had the rather arch headline: "Read It Later: A Procrastinator's Memoir".THE BOTTOM LINE"When that kid was 10, even then he was a little shit." - Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money and Power by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher (Simon & Schuster)..

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