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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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