An unpretentious account of a proud career in service to public safety.
Conversational memoir of the author’s career in the FBI.
Moore is candid about his personal flaws and shortcomings, but most of the book is a love letter to a dangerous career and an agency filled with colleagues he admired. His assignments included counterterrorism, especially after 9/11; operator of a SWAT team that conducted surprise raids; sniper with the highest sharpshooter status; and pilot of FBI aircraft. Despite the dramatic-sounding assignments, Moore emphasizes that a career in the FBI does not involve around-the-clock adventuring; bureaucratic routine is part of the mix. Early in his career, he received a posting to the FBI office in Salt Lake City, an outpost where excitement and even normality sometimes seemed lacking. His first substantial assignment took Moore to rural Idaho, where he was keeping watch on members of a white-supremacist group known for violence. The author does not hide his mistakes due to inexperience and openly admits how fear nearly overcame him at certain moments. As he became more experienced, fear rarely entered his mind; he became an adrenaline junkie. Welcome interludes explore how Moore's career occasionally meshed well with family life, but more often kept him away from his wife and children. The section on how Moore met and romanced the woman he would marry is especially poignant and well-written, while some of the sections about pursuing criminals are less compelling because they contain too much barely relevant detail. When Moore steps back from spinning narratives about tracking specific criminals, he offers fascinating insights.
An unpretentious account of a proud career in service to public safety.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-914090-70-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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