Though these fleeting glimpses barely scratch the surface of what work as a peace officer demands, the African-American...
Stimulating narratives from police officers who have walked the most crime-ridden beats in inner-city America.
Author of a dozen police procedurals (Criminal Element, 2002, etc.), the late Holton was a 29-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department; many of the 28 peace officers he recruited for this collection also hail from his home turf. In testimonies often just a few pages long, they convey the treacherous nature of the terrains they patrol. Several are now retired and in retrospect view their former duties as excessively dangerous—a reasonable view of such tasks as serving arrest warrants to ultraviolent felons or hog-tying a 350-pound prison inmate. The captain of corrections officers at an Indiana maximum-security prison shares vivid memories of Vietnam, prison politics and the time he drove to Gary (“the Homicide Capital of the United States”) to confiscate an SUV from a friend’s enraged ex-husband. The first black commissioner of corrections in Massachusetts is happy to report that he still works toward prison reform after 50 years in the field. The female police officer’s perspective is well represented, and their adventures are as harrowing and hazardous as those of the men. Indeed, many also had to endure harassment, unwarranted scrutiny and prejudice from their male colleagues. Foster parent Florida Bradstreet of the New Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff’s Office believes that she’s successful at getting confessions “because many of the suspects look upon me as a mother figure.” Chicago’s Tanya Junior says she never takes her work home, even though she’s married to a policeman. A former undercover narcotics agent who operated out of West Harlem recalls his career in the underbelly of New York City crime fighting. Holton shares his own reflections on life as a lieutenant commander following in his father’s footsteps, and on the perils of simultaneously being a cop and a popular fiction writer.
Though these fleeting glimpses barely scratch the surface of what work as a peace officer demands, the African-American perspective is bracing.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-86820-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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