A sinewy, stomach-twisting memoir that shows it takes more than a badge and gun to be a cop.
A Michigan police officer recounts 25 years of nabbing suspects and terrifying life-or-death moments.
Christensen has seen enough danger for many lifetimes. His gritty, often shocking memoir describes the hazards and heroics of being a cop in Lawrence and Kalamazoo, Michigan, from 1988 to 2012. Always eager for difficult assignments, Christensen worked the most violent inner-city neighborhoods. As if this wasn’t perilous enough, Christensen also served as a firefighter, EMT and an Army Reserve soldier, once volunteering to go to Afghanistan as a combat adviser. The book opens with a graphic account of how, as a young officer, Christensen was badly beaten by a drunk driver. Though he managed to knock the suspect unconscious with a last-ditch knee strike to the face, the incident spurred a lifelong desire to improve his battle readiness. This desire would serve him well as he confronted nightmarish situations—encountering bullet-ridden murder victims, managing enraged rioters near Western Michigan University, delivering a baby in a hotel laundry room. Christensen is a gifted storyteller with a penchant for grisly details worthy of a detective novel. Once while assisting at the scene of a fatal car crash, Christensen helped remove bodies from the wreckage: “We simply placed three gut piles into three separate body bags. The backseat passenger was literally scraped off the back seat with gloved hands. There was nothing to pick up. I just scooped up guts in my hands and flung them into the body bag.” Christensen states he doesn’t intend his story to be an instructional guide, but there is a significant teaching component to the book. He offers tips for fellow officers on topics ranging from traffic-stop safety to career planning. More importantly, civilian readers will gain a deeper understanding of what police officers face. The danger cannot be overstated—more than 4,200 officers died in the line of duty during the author’s career. Christensen writes candidly about the emotional and psychological aspects of the job. His personal revelations shatter more than one stereotype about law enforcement.
A sinewy, stomach-twisting memoir that shows it takes more than a badge and gun to be a cop.Pub Date: May 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495301056
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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