In-your-face violence and resilient heroism that leaps off the page.
The life and work of a tireless Compton, Calif. beat cop.
Baker spent his early years living in the Los Angeles suburb of Boyle Heights, a place filled with a variety of ethnicities who had migrated there, primarily Latinos and African-Americans. This integration came in handy when the family relocated to affordable Compton in 1950 and he was sent to Catholic school in nearby Watts. As a white boy, he stood out in the predominately black-populated school, but held his own excelling as a natural athlete. Black gang activity soon dominated the western side of the city, while the white citizens organized themselves in the East. By the time Baker joined the Marines, the Watts riots had broken out and Compton became a war zone, spurring the author to join the Compton Police Department in 1968. Capably tracing his distinguished 18-year career policing “America’s most dangerous city,” the author briskly narrates a cavalcade of harrowing stories as he graduated from a cautious rookie to a respected if battered officer to a seasoned sergeant. Par for the course was the violently bloody, racial gang warfare (Baker offers an expansive historical perspective), rescuing rape victims, drug trafficking and their resultant homicides, rampant gunfighting and the backlash of smug, fearless criminals who threatened law enforcement’s grip over their dominion. Additionally, Baker received a crash course on the inside politics, corruption and nepotism of the police brigade. Academy Award–nominated screenwriter (Nixon, Ali), Rivele (co-author: Lieutenant Ramsey’s War: From Horse Soldier to Guerrilla Commander, 2005, etc.) ably compiled boxes of recordings that Baker created after initially dismissing the offer to tell his life story. The result is an exhaustive, thrilling, ultraviolent story about the endless struggle that the Compton PD (who disbanded in 2000) faced in attempting to prevent the city from “dissolving into chaos.”
In-your-face violence and resilient heroism that leaps off the page.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59687-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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