Next book

BLUE ON BLUE

AN INSIDER'S STORY OF GOOD COPS CATCHING BAD COPS

This superb memoir can be read for its sheer entertainment or as a primer on police work—or both.

A recently retired high-ranking New York City police supervisor recounts his career, with an emphasis on his unpleasant but necessary assignment flushing out corrupt cops.

With assistance from journalist Dillow (co-author: Trauma Red: The Making of a Surgeon in War and in America's Cities, 2014, etc.), Campisi offers a compelling, educational, memorable account of his rise through the police department ranks until he was ordered to accept an assignment no cop ever wanted: to become part of the Internal Affairs Bureau, hostilely known among rank-and-file police as "the rat squad." Before his appointment, the bureau had been viewed as a dumping ground for incompetent, lazy, or previously dirty officers. With aggressive support from a new police chief, Campisi found ways to alter the reputation of the bureau while also improving techniques to catch and punish cops who cut corners, stole drugs, or employed excessive force. The author does not shy away from going behind the scenes of infamous cases, including the brutalizing of Abner Louima and the shooting death of Amadou Diallo. Refreshingly, Campisi rarely comes across as defensive about the police department, but he does emphasize that an overwhelming percentage of the 30,000-plus cops on the job in NYC handle their responsibilities as prescribed. Another element that Campisi relates without sounding defensive is the idea of the "blue wall of silence”—good cops protecting corrupt cops. The author writes convincingly that such protective behavior is also common among physicians, lawyers, and many other professions. Though Campisi expected to remain within the Internal Affairs Bureau for two years, he served there for a record-setting 21 years before retiring in 2014. He is worried that since his retirement, the unit's aggressiveness might have been de-emphasized, with a parallel concern that the lax screening of cops might lead to terrorist infiltration of the NYPD.

This superb memoir can be read for its sheer entertainment or as a primer on police work—or both.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5011-2719-9

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016

Next book

NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

Next book

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Close Quickview