A sometimes-compelling but ultimately biased account of the LAPD’s past.
A former police officer offers a history of the Los Angeles Police Department from its founding in 1869 to the 1960s.
The LAPD has always been a scandal-plagued institution; its first chief was shot dead by one of his own officers during an argument over the reward money for the capture of a woman accused of stealing jewelry. The department, former LA cop Bultema writes, became “a breeding ground for corruption—casting a dark shadow over the department that did not lift for decades.” Tracing the LAPD’s evolution from its origins in what was then a crime-ridden frontier outpost—“ever-present lynch mobs” made “bodies hanging from trees and ranch posts” a common sight—the author provides plenty of detail and deft turns of phrase. One city street in the early 1900s “doubled as a racetrack, except there were no jockeys but scantily dressed prostitutes,” he notes at one point; at another, he says that one police chief “possessed all the characteristics of a man best suited for anything but the command of LAPD.” The corruption was so blatant, he writes, that one police captain solicited a bribe from a gangster by saying, “I have a ranch to pay for.” These earlier sections offer an engaging history of a troubled department. However, the book’s chapters covering the post-Prohibition LAPD egregiously minimize Chief James E. Davis’ use of the lawless Red Squad to infiltrate and harass labor unions as simply “following specific directives” from the LA mayor. Even more shocking is the adulation for Chief William H. Parker, whom Bultema extols for having “transformed the LAPD into an efficient, technologically advanced, and incorruptible operation” during his tenure from 1950 to 1966; there’s no mention of how, as journalists such as Joe Domanick have shown, Parker’s LAPD terrorized the city’s minority residents, fueling resentment that erupted in the Watts riots of 1965—or of how the department continued to be corrupted by money, racism, and power, as in the 1998-2000 Rampart Division scandal. It results in a work whose claims are hard to swallow.
A sometimes-compelling but ultimately biased account of the LAPD’s past.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 273
Publisher: P.D. Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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