Mr. Martínez never wavers in his focus on the Salvadorans, Hondurans, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans who travel 'without anyone but robbers and kidnappers even glancing in their direction' ... In the original, Central American peasant Spanish collided with Mexican narco-gangster argot, underlining the difference between the migrants and those who exploit them. It would be nearly impossible to render these distinctive forms of speech without the slang sounding forced and artificial. But Mr. Martínez’s voice, that of an attentive observer who has seen everything but still has the capacity to feel indignation and sympathy, comes through intact ... 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 ... By capturing that grim reality, and in such gripping prose and detail, Mr. Martínez has both distinguished himself and done us all a vital public service.

...a gale-force book, a sweep across the equally daunting criminal and physical landscapes from the vantage point of those at the war's coalface ... But no one has yet traced the survivors of such massacres; no one has travelled with them into Mexico from the barrios of El Salvador, jumping trains collectively known as 'the Beast', at times flagged down or ambushed by the most vicious cartel, Los Zetas ... Martínez did these things, to learn the risks and rules first hand ... Martínez is clearly a wonderful listener – journalism's rarest and most important attribute – and this makes his prose resound with raw authenticity ... As important as Martínez's testimony is his devictimisation of these people.

Martinez – who faces untold dangers as a reporter – gets beyond these numbers with skill and subtlety. He tells the stories of individuals with names, ages, faces, families, for whom migration is a matter of life and death ... Tales of death and survival on 'La Bestia' (The Beast) – the infamous freight train which carries thousands of migrants towards 'El Norte', on which Martinez travelled eight times for this book – are only part of his fluid account ... Martinez reiterates that for migrants, knowledge is key. So many that he meets seem to have little idea what awaits them on their journey, perhaps because so few accounts like Martinez’s exist.

Strung together like beads on a rosary, the migrant testimonies in these vignettes tell a litany of horrors ... Mr. Martinez speaks for these Central American 'migrants who don’t matter' without appropriating their voices. His writing is eloquent, gritty, and incisive, embedded in vividly observed detail, while his finely honed interviewing skills are evident in the trust shown by informants with everything to lose ... Mr. Martinez paints an ugly picture of contemporary Mexico, especially since he is not just writing about the seamy underbelly of society, but also about those who know of, but ignore, or are complicit in gross inhumanity. The escalation of violence from isolated incidents to epidemic scale, from machetes to assault rifles marks the end of an age of innocence when even the underworld followed a code of ethics of sorts.

...a shining model of what journalism as a practice of solidarity can look like, and a must-read for anyone who believes journalism can be a tool for transforming society. The book’s virtues lie in Martínez’s unwavering commitment to documenting, first-hand, the most dangerous migrant route in the hemisphere and in the quality of his writing: observant, austere, and lyrical, yet seething with indignation beneath the cool accumulation of detail ... Through their stories, Martínez paints a picture of courageous, audacious, and endlessly resilient people on the move, driven into the arms of the empire by economic hardship and the spiral of violence that has consumed Central America in recent years ... Whether he’s recounting the personal tragedies that drive people north; or describing the frequent accidents, assaults, and robberies atop the train; or detailing the particular struggles of migrant women, an estimated eighty per cent of whom are sexually assaulted along the route; the horrors of Martínez’s account are compounded by the terseness of their telling ... Martínez’s dispatches bear witness to the deepening of Mexico’s militarized drug war, that blunt tool of social control that in recent years has engulfed the country in spectacular violence.

This searing account of the hardships suffered by Central American migrants headed through Mexico to the United States comes from true shoe-leather reporting ... This straightforward translation, first published in Spanish in 2010, doesn't flinch at migrants' plight, and as the drug wars further rend Mexico asunder, it's hard to imagine the situation changing.

Grim, grisly account of the predations suffered by impoverished migrants on the hazardous journey to 'el Norte' ... Martínez’s debut is the hard-won result of immersive journalism ... Martínez writes precisely, with bleak gallows humor ... Yet all his observations are numbingly bleak ... The narrative is a litany of horrors: casual murder, near-universal sexual assault and frequent accidental deaths via freight-hopping ... Martínez develops attentive portraits of the migrants, officials, aid workers and criminals he encounters; his first-person account is executed with passion and grit, illuminating a heartbreaking yet easily ignored reality ... A harrowing look at the real costs of globalization, immigration and drug-prohibition politics, short on solutions and absent hope.