A fantastic story with enough minor flaws to irritate but enough real-life drama to keep readers coming back.
Village Voice staff writer Rayman turns his newspaper series about NYPD corruption into a full-length book.
Introducing the major players in this drama right at the climax of its conflict, the author’s account is immediately striking. Fast-paced and intriguing throughout most of the book, the story remains fascinating even when Rayman goes into intricate detail about the lives of Officer Adrian Schoolcraft and those around him. Schoolcraft’s story became noteworthy when he joined the NYPD in 2002 amid the success of CompStat, an accounting system designed to help the department pinpoint trouble areas for more officers. CompStat and Schoolcraft didn’t mesh well, though, and Schoolcraft believed the system was leading to corruption by those in the precinct who pushed for better numbers. He began wearing a wire to work, recording everything that happened in an attempt to prove not only that the problem existed, but also that it was due to pressure from the top. He went to Internal Affairs with his accusations. After that, his job—already in some jeopardy due to low numbers—became downright distressing. What the department said was simply good management, he saw as harassment and even a threat to his safety. Eventually, he was able to make his story public and bring a lawsuit against the city. The tension remains high throughout, with Schoolcraft’s emotions described exceptionally well. Unfortunately, Rayman’s account feels rather biased in favor of Schoolcraft, and he tends to write off the NYPD’s criticisms of the man. Rayman also tends to repeat the most egregious offenses caught on tape, which loosens the cohesion of the narrative, reminding readers that it is based on a series of shorter pieces.
A fantastic story with enough minor flaws to irritate but enough real-life drama to keep readers coming back.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-230-34227-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
