Despite their anecdotal nature, these punchy policing tales seem provocatively true to life.
Raucous recollections from a career as a New York City cop, from a veteran of The Moth storytelling series.
Osborne retired in 2003 as the commander of the Manhattan Gang Squad after 20 years of service, yet he seems more aligned with the street cop’s earthy brotherhood than with the authority of command: “It’s a good feeling knowing that you belong to a family [and] also the biggest and baddest gang in the city.” Although his narrative approach is generalized rather than focused on concrete case histories, the author portrays a rough arc of the transformation of New York City from the decay and constant crime of the early 1980s to the historic crime reductions followed by the greater horror of 9/11 (at which he was present). In explaining his post-retirement interest in storytelling, he writes, for “twenty years my family and friends really didn’t understand what I did for a living.” The son of a tough cop himself, Osborne seemingly never considered any other life. Tonally, he comes off as an avuncular, world-weary tough guy, embodying the “cops know best” attitude that many find alienating. Yet he elevates his perspective by displaying empathy for the civilians, victims and even criminals he has encountered, drawing complex lines between the “lost souls” and “evil motherfuckers” of the underworld. The book has a light, episodic structure, with most chapters built around a less-understood aspect of policing (the weird dynamics of midnight tours or elite anti-crime units) or a dramatic street scene (a near riot in Washington Square Park). Osborne is often humorous, although some readers may find him frank to the point of cynicism: “People like to think cops are racists and only lock up minorities….After being a cop for a few years, you learn to dislike people equally.”
Despite their anecdotal nature, these punchy policing tales seem provocatively true to life.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53962-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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