McDonald tries to unravel the blue-walled enigma of the NYPD through the lens of a sprawling Irish Catholic family memoir. McDonald’s father, a detective lieutenant, was among the first of many cops to violate regulations and move his family from the city to then-rural Rockland County, a calculated retreat from the tide of drugs and gangs that he saw coming even in 1955. McDonald explores the dichotomy between this artificially tranquil police domesticity and an urban sphere in which “the cops were losing—; this schism imploded by the early 1970s, during McDonald’s adolescence, a time of anticop fervor, high crime, and his own “holding onto the longhaired remnants of the 1960s.” Also told are the parallel histories of his grandfather’s pre-1920 experiences within the corrupt Tammany NYPD (a muscular yet meticulous evocation of old New York that recalls Luc Sante’s Low Life), and of his brother, who became a detective after high-risk Street Crimes duty, was demoted after two ambiguous incidents that nearly drove him from the force, then ultimately regained his gold shield and became a teacher of police science. Throughout, McDonald eloquently addresses the fascination those close to cops find in their volatile circumstances, while maintaining a jaundiced view of how the department treats its own. He examines his own youthful confusion, wistfully taking the NYPD exam during a hiring freeze and carousing, gambling, and loafing in suburban discos or “gangster school.” But he is more circumspect where his brother and father are concerned. Although his portrait of the guarded inner lives of law enforcers in the midst of savage criminality is arguably as good as it could be, these men remain somewhat distant and at times opaque, and their experiences feel less than archetypal. Still, McDonald’s first book offers an original take upon this storied (and notorious) institution and on the conflicted inner lives of one cop family, written with grace, seriousness, and historical understanding.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-525-94396-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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