The Most Violent Year

A crime drama set in New York City during the winter of 1981, statistically one of the most violent years in the city's history, and centered on the lives of an immigrant and his family trying to expand their business and capitalize on opportunities as the rampant violence, decay, and corruption of the day drag them in and threaten to destroy all they have built.

A description from the belly of the beast that is MS-13: the first book to reveal the inner workings of the most violent gang in the world, written by an anthropologist who was there.

Michael Portillo investigates what makes ordinary people commit extreme acts of violence, in the final Horizon of the series, and explores the fine line between control and aggression.

Michael looks at the environmental and psychological factors that can cause an individual to snap and to lose their self-control. He explores a much darker side of people's nature and asks if anyone can be driven to deliberately kill. In a thought-provoking and sometimes uncomfortable journey, Michael discovers that each of us could be inherently more violent than we think.

Michael learns what it's like to inflict pain as he takes part in the Tinku, an annual violence ritual in the Bolivian Andes. To find out if violence is addictive he meets an ex-football hooligan, who lived for his Saturday fights, and a former child soldier from war-torn Sudan, who tells a harrowing story of brainwashing, torture and regret.

A stunning look inside the world of violent hate groups by a onetime white supremacist leader who, shaken by a personal tragedy, realized the error of his ways and abandoned his destructive life to become an anti-hate activist.