In Asia’s narcotics-producing heartland, the Wa reign supreme. They dominate the Golden Triangle, a mountainous stretch of Burma between Thailand and China. Their 30,000-strong army, wielding missiles and attack drones, makes Mexican cartels look like street gangs.

Wa moguls are unrivaled in the region’s $60 billion meth trade and infamous for mass-producing pink, vanilla-scented speed pills. Drugs finance Wa State, a bona fide nation with its own laws, anthems, schools, and electricity grid. Though revered by their people, Wa leaders are scorned by US policymakers as vicious “kingpins” who “poison our society for profit.”

In Narcotopia, award-winning journalist Patrick Winn uncovers the truth behind Asia’s top...

Vashanti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas?

She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.

This is a incredible book. Apparently a true story, a wealthy benefactor sets up a trust to provide a Third Class Train Ticket for all of the residents of a small Indian village to travel throughout their country. No one has ever been anywhere and this is the story of the first group that sets out to fulfill the bequest. There is joy and sadness, victory and tragedy.

Third Class Ticket is at once a celebration, a lament, and a swansong for a country that is in itself surprised at being one. The book is brilliant, in that you get to hear from people you seldom hear from, and their life, their viewpoints, their aspirations all bring forth a portrait that is as rare as it is beautiful. Which is also why it is a surprise that this book isn't better known. It should be. It is a classic.

The Big Blare is, like these characters, an implausible combination of greed, vanity, depravity, solipsism, selfishness, and insecurity all overlaid with an out-of-control case of Dunning-Kruger–style narcissism. And this perfect storm of psychological pathologies is wrapped up in a physical package so viciously exaggerated that it violates the rule that fictional characters should have some type of real-world plausibility.

My only problem with the Big Blare is that he somehow escaped the fiction world he was clearly made for—an inspired satire of the crudest elements of the American character all personified in one tumescent, ochre-tinged symbol. And when he escaped, he brought the fiction world with him and marooned almost half of the country inside it.