An inspirational, detailed, and informative police account with current relevance.
This memoir chronicles a policewoman’s historic legal battle with the Los Angeles Police Department, challenging institutionalized sexual discrimination.
In 1947, after serving in the Army for five years—and attaining the rank of captain—Blake began the application process to join the LAPD. She received her acceptance to the Police Academy in May 1948 at the age of 27 and walked an LA beat for three years. In addition to the hardship of having to patrol wearing a skirt and heels, women were ordered to carry their guns in their black police purses along with handcuffs. Still, the author liked being on the street. In the ’50s, she was temporarily transferred “to work Lincoln Heights Jail.” This was evidently retaliation for her refusing to resign from the Army Reserves. According to Blake, the LAPD assumed any woman in the military was a lesbian. This was considered even worse than being a woman on the police force. But not long after, all female officers were taken off the street. The book describes the career consequences of this decision: “Preventing women from walking a beat or going out on patrol not only deprived women of that kind of active duty, it deprived them of many job opportunities that required precisely that kind of experience.” After 25 years of trying to effect change from within, the author filed a landmark Title VII lawsuit against the department. Blake’s memoir, heavily edited and reorganized by co-author Gross, focuses primarily on the professional side of the policewoman’s life as well as on her extraordinary seven-year legal fight. That court battle led to a change in police hiring and the promotion of women and minorities throughout the country. But readers are given only a peek into Blake’s tumultuous private life, which included three marriages, alcoholism, and serious health issues resulting from the stress of constant on-the-job harassment. As such, the final product is less a memoir than a valuable—and at times, frightening—documentation of the accepted code of misbehavior safely ensconced behind the “blue wall of silence.” Page after page, readers see Blake enduring in-your-face hostility and quiet snickering with resolve and courage. It makes her ultimate victory that much sweeter.
An inspirational, detailed, and informative police account with current relevance. (foreword, afterword, appendix)Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9998584-8-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Incubation Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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