An effective recruiting poster for women in police work, and a highly readable memoir for law-and-order buffs of whatever...
Watch out, Clarice Starling—there's a new sheriff in town, and she's the real deal.
Comparisons with the worried FBI profiler who chases Hannibal Lecter around the globe are inevitable; though Thomas Harris may not have based his character directly upon now-retired special agent DeLong, she fits the bill for a real-life counterpart very nicely indeed. DeLong adds a solid entry to the library of real-crime literature, recounting her efforts over a distinguished career to bring all manner of reprobates to justice, from scum-of-the-earth child molesters to more rarified figures like the Unabomber and the Tylenol Killer. Her pages are packed with grim statistics—99 percent of all sex crimes, she notes, are committed by men, a significant number of them over the age of 50; fewer than half of the 200 to 300 children who go missing for more than 24 hours return home alive—but, despite such dour numbers, her narrative is highly personalized and full of juicy anecdotes that make it a (sometimes guilty) pleasure to read. It's clear from those tight stories that DeLong took her work seriously—as she writes, she firmly believes that “the Bureau [is] a big shark fence protecting the world from the dangers and predators of the deep,” though, she adds later, extending the benthic metaphor, “It is up to us as citizens, as a society . . . to decide who should be swimming freely in our midst.” Her devotion to the FBI did not keep her from falling afoul, late in her career, of agency rules forbidding moonlighting, to which she had to turn to pay the bills. DeLong writes effectively and without overmuch rancor about the culture of the FBI, a once males-only club (thanks to former director J. Edgar Hoover's antipathy toward women, institutionalized in an agency-wide conviction that women just couldn't hack the blood-and-guts work of crime-fighting) that she helped storm. When DeLong entered the agency, she notes, “women represented less than 4 percent of the agent force of 8,000.” She adds, “Today we're still a minority but a much more significant one—15 percent of the total of 11,500 agents.”
An effective recruiting poster for women in police work, and a highly readable memoir for law-and-order buffs of whatever persuasion.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6707-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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