Above-average entry in the My Life Undercover genre.
First-person account of the author’s 26 years infiltrating gangs, organized-crime syndicates and other groups of lawbreakers.
Hamer entered the FBI in 1980 after attending law school and serving in the Marine Corps as a judge advocate. He volunteered for undercover work, drawing strength for this demanding job from his devoted wife and children, and from “an unwavering belief that God, for whatever reason and however undeserved, had wrapped His protective arms around me.” As with every book of this ilk, it is difficult to verify the details; the author notes that the Bureau required him to submit the manuscript for pre-publication review and ordered that the names of all FBI agents be deleted. Hamer’s account, however, rings truer than many other books by undercover law-enforcement agents. Bravado is almost entirely absent, and a ruminative vein runs through the case accounts. The author worked undercover to expose the criminal activities of Los Angeles-based street gangs, plus various ethnic-centered organized-crime groups, including Sicilians, Mexicans, Russians and Asians. The main narrative thread concerns his infiltration of the North American Man/Boy Love Association. The group’s members, adult men who desired sexual relations with boys, usually pre-teens, apparently convinced themselves that these relationships were not merely carnal and were in violation of the law only because of narrow-minded legislators, judges and police officers. Working the case year after year sickened Hamer, but he explains that he reined in his anger by keeping in mind the importance of convicting such predators. To his credit, he portrays most of his targets as complicated human beings, rather than simple perverts. A few lengthy rehashes of conversations with his targets seem superfluous, but in general Hamer keeps the narrative interesting. Especially educational is his depiction of the lengths to which undercover agents must go to gather admissible evidence for an indictment and a trial.
Above-average entry in the My Life Undercover genre.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59995-101-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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