A swift-moving history of and tribute to officers who are “out there at all hours of the day and night, kicking down doors,...
The story behind the country’s oldest law enforcement agency, the U.S. Marshals service, as told by its former associate director for operations Earp, with veteran co-author Fisher (co-author, with Tom Coughlin: Earn the Right to Win, 2013, etc.).
In this real-life version of the TV series America's Most Wanted, Earp explores the service known around the world for heroes like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and significant events like the Shootout at the O.K. Corral and its development over the years since its formation in 1789. Established during the administration of George Washington as the police force of the federal court system, the service has a unique function in American law enforcement, and this function has been transformed—especially since the Reagan administration—as tough-on-crime policies have increased demands on law enforcement agencies. The marshals' mandate extends across the whole republic. They are empowered to deputize agencies of federal and local government—e.g., the U.S. Forest Service, parole officers and others—to aid their operations. Anyone who has run out on a warrant for arrest, skipped court appointments, broken parole or work-release agreements, broken out of jail or comes under one of their prioritized categories of criminal can find themselves the target of pursuit. Earp recounts how such infamous figures as Panama's Gen. Manuel Noriega and Puerto Rican terrorist William Morales were brought to justice. The author describes their investigative methods, especially their mastery of modern technology to identify, locate and track down their targets. Each aspect of the narrative is introduced through its own kind of action story and brings to life the dangers and rewards of a deputy's life. Earp's tales are educational, and he highlights the ingenuity and training required to become a U.S. Marshal.
A swift-moving history of and tribute to officers who are “out there at all hours of the day and night, kicking down doors, stopping vehicles, and arresting heinous fugitives.”Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-222723-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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