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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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