Thorough, personality-driven reportage on policing, albeit tilted toward the police’s perspective.
Behind-the-scenes looks at key figures in the New York Police Department from the 1970s to the present.
Daly, a Daily Beast correspondent who also wrote for New York Daily News and New York Magazine, looks at the past four decades of New York’s police force through two principals. First is officer Steven McDonald, who was paralyzed from the neck down in a 1986 shooting, a moment that underscored the city’s beleaguered reputation. McDonald publicly forgave his shooter, a gesture that went some way to easing tensions between police and citizens. But perhaps more directly influential was Jack Maple, a transit officer whose rejection of the police’s bureaucracy and cliquishness led to the creation of stats-driven, proactive policing that was key to the drop in crime in the city into the 21st century. At least that’s how Daly frames it. Though he’s alert to moments when the NYPD disgraced itself (the Central Park Five, Amadou Diallo, stop and frisk), his approach is to suggest that those shortcomings were problems that a straight-talking technocrat like Maple could responsibly, if not completely, address. (Daly’s laser focus on the NYPD precludes him from exploring other economic and sociological forces.) The main problem, Daly writes, wasn’t within NYPD headquarters but at City Hall, especially during the rule of Rudolph Giuliani, who was buffoonish when he wasn’t meddling, installing inept cronies in key roles and unwinding successful efforts. He was, notes the author, “a stridently divisive figure whose rantings about zero tolerance had made him an intolerant zero. He took religious exception to a painting of the Virgin Mary in the Brooklyn Museum he had never seen and announced the formation of a ‘decency task force.’ ” Heaving various law enforcement sins onto Giuliani allows the main narrative to become occasionally hagiographic toward police, sometimes literally: When McDonald died in 2017, Daly reported on efforts to make him a candidate for sainthood.
Thorough, personality-driven reportage on policing, albeit tilted toward the police’s perspective.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6433-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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 Yorker staff 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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
