A gritty, straightforward memoir about corrective determination written from both sides of the law.
A Queens native recounts his evolution from drug dealer to decorated veteran police officer.
Though he was raised to be a law-abiding, productive member of society, the streets had a different plan for former NYPD deputy inspector Pegues. He intensively details his childhood as a brother to four older sisters and the son of a functioning alcoholic father within a family barely subsisting on welfare. Desperate for easy money, in the early 1980s, when he was 13, the author began selling drugs. With his likable, smooth-talking demeanor, his illicit deals became more lucrative as the caliber of drugs escalated—but so did the violence. When events reached deadly proportions, even then, Pegues believed “it’s never too late to turn your life around” and his own “exit plan” included enlisting in the Army after high school graduation. His memoir’s subsequent sections detail the author’s time as a member of the NYPD, where diligent police work was often met with disillusionment and criticism within the tacitly segregated “lily white” precinct to which he was assigned. Complementing the brash experiences Pegues illustrates as both a drug dealer and a civil servant, his memoir is ornamented with raw street vernacular, lending it authenticity. As it wraps up, however, his empowering story darkens and discourages with discontent. Though the author retired in 2013 after an eventful and ambitious, rank-climbing 21-year career, his final chapters are world-weary and indignant, as he accuses regional media and the police force at large of discrediting him and stripping his legacy of its honor. More distressing are his allegations about the questionable motivations of the 67th Precinct, the resurgence of broken windows policing, and the dismantling of the urban inner-city youth programs and anti-violence efforts he’d established. A multimillion-dollar lawsuit remains pending.
A gritty, straightforward memoir about corrective determination written from both sides of the law.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1049-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
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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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