Former NYPD deputy commissioner Maple reveals in a tough, funny memoir the radical anti-crime strategies he deployed in achieving unprecedented reductions in violent crimes throughout New York City, returning the murder rate to pre-1964 levels. The currently rotund, foppish Maple learned his trade in the oft-disparaged Transit Police during the legendary high-crime 1970s and 1980s, when, perversely, he was upbraided by superiors for his guile and aggression in making street-level collars of the “mopes—’scam artists, robbers, pimps—who infested midtown at that time. Now he writes the way he once chased down skells: with a hard-charging mix of incongruous high-life carousing (waiting at Elaine’s for high-priority crime calls), “zany” recollections of the street, and bursts of innovative law-enforcement theory that, if fractious, grow upon the reader. Maple pioneered the first subway “decoy squad” (cops posing as easy victims); his star later rose under the rigorous and publicity-minded Commissioner William Bratton, for whom Maple quietly enacted measures that literally changed the moribund structure of the NYPD and its investigative procedures (e.g., he demanded hard pursuit of thousands of “failed-to-appear” warrants and in-depth debriefing of all arrests for additional crime knowledge), and resulted in a huge increase in street-level crime prevention, as anyone since busted for “quality-of-life violations” now knows. Although Maple is his own best advocate, claiming his methods en grande could reduce crime nationally to pre-1961 levels, he fortunately appears in his own tale not as swell- headed, but as a slightly absurdist cop figure who outthought his own macho, constricted occupational culture. This quality, as well as Maple’s original perceptions regarding criminal predators, whom he portrays in simultaneously funny and unsettling fashion, elevates The Crime Fighter far above the blustery standard of law-enforcement memoirs. As Maple the consultant does not, presumably, work on the cheap, one could seriously recommend his book to law- enforcement professionals who are willing to think creatively and work overtime in facing their own criminal morasses.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-49363-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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