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
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
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
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