Crackling sharp—and utterly compelling.
A street-smart and hilarious memoir from Conlon, who takes readers behind the squad-room door to reveal the inner life of New York’s Finest.
The author isn’t exactly a typical policeman: he graduated from Harvard, and he published a “Cop’s Diary” under a pseudonym in The New Yorker. But he really does have “blue blood,” flowing from his great-grandfather, a crooked cop who was a Tammany Hall bagman, through his uncle, a veteran NYPD officer, and his father, who served in the NYPD briefly before joining the FBI. Conlon’s odyssey runs from early euphoria (graduation from Police Academy, work as a housing division cop in the South Bronx) through disillusionment (clashes with new superiors at a Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit he had come to cherish) to eventual triumph (promotion to the Detective Bureau). His personal trajectory almost exactly encompasses the Giuliani years, when New Yorkers’ response to the police department careened from acclaim for crime reduction to anger over the Louima and Diallo cases, ending with gratitude again in the wake of the World Trade Center attack. Although the extensive descriptions of stakeouts could have been pruned, it’s unlikely that anyone will soon provide a more literate view of a police precinct: “good-hearted if sometimes misguided, bound by duty and tradition and semi-private heartbreak.” Conlon’s prose, buffed to a high sheen, mixes the rich and rowdy dialogue of police and “perps” with department lore about legends like Eddie Egan and Frank Serpico, literary allusions, and overviews of daily routine that bristle with sharp observation. (“Junkies, coming down, can go into a whole-body cramp, and have hands as stiff as lobster claws.”) It’s all here: wayward crackhead informants, the roughhouse camaraderie of police units, precinct pettifogging (better to call in sick for “flu-like symptoms” than for colds), the haunting fear that a lying complaint by a civilian might derail a career, and, above all, the gravitational, 24/7 pull of “The Job” with its “wreckage and wonders.”
Crackling sharp—and utterly compelling.Pub Date: April 12, 2004
ISBN: 1-57322-266-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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