This superb memoir can be read for its sheer entertainment or as a primer on police work—or both.
A recently retired high-ranking New York City police supervisor recounts his career, with an emphasis on his unpleasant but necessary assignment flushing out corrupt cops.
With assistance from journalist Dillow (co-author: Trauma Red: The Making of a Surgeon in War and in America's Cities, 2014, etc.), Campisi offers a compelling, educational, memorable account of his rise through the police department ranks until he was ordered to accept an assignment no cop ever wanted: to become part of the Internal Affairs Bureau, hostilely known among rank-and-file police as "the rat squad." Before his appointment, the bureau had been viewed as a dumping ground for incompetent, lazy, or previously dirty officers. With aggressive support from a new police chief, Campisi found ways to alter the reputation of the bureau while also improving techniques to catch and punish cops who cut corners, stole drugs, or employed excessive force. The author does not shy away from going behind the scenes of infamous cases, including the brutalizing of Abner Louima and the shooting death of Amadou Diallo. Refreshingly, Campisi rarely comes across as defensive about the police department, but he does emphasize that an overwhelming percentage of the 30,000-plus cops on the job in NYC handle their responsibilities as prescribed. Another element that Campisi relates without sounding defensive is the idea of the "blue wall of silence”—good cops protecting corrupt cops. The author writes convincingly that such protective behavior is also common among physicians, lawyers, and many other professions. Though Campisi expected to remain within the Internal Affairs Bureau for two years, he served there for a record-setting 21 years before retiring in 2014. He is worried that since his retirement, the unit's aggressiveness might have been de-emphasized, with a parallel concern that the lax screening of cops might lead to terrorist infiltration of the NYPD.
This superb memoir can be read for its sheer entertainment or as a primer on police work—or both.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2719-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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
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