Though entertainingly readable in a grimy sort of way, this is more a tangle of sex, violence, and betrayal than a serious...
A grim, fevered memoir of pre–Drug Enforcement Administration anti-drug warriors raising havoc in New York City.
Unkefer argues that the little-known Federal Bureau of Narcotics was crucial in staunching the flow of hard drugs into the country before it was merged with another department in 1968: “The bizarre and cunning way that they fought the Mafia to a standstill made them legendary.” However, because he builds the narrative around disguised characters and dramatic reconstruction, without clear discussion of actual cases, this feels more like pulpy fiction than the history it represents. The colorful first-person voice endeavors to portray a noirish group of rule-breaking tough guys, yet they come off as a strange combination of a drunken fraternity and Nixonian dirty-tricks squad. Unkefer paints the upper-level administrators as pompous and naïve and claims that the real power lay with two agents: Dewey, a goofy, Mickey Rooney type who was also a skilled assassin, and Michael, a master manipulator who observes, “Stop the drugs. That’s all anybody cares about. No one cares about the law, or us….They take all the credit. We do the dirty work.” They plunged the earnest but increasingly damaged (and eventually cocaine-addicted) young Unkefer into undercover work, where he repeatedly stumbled into horrific encounters with killers and junkies: “There was death, misery, and shooting every day. I had tried to ignore it since my first day on the job.” Following a series of increasingly labyrinthine cases against upper-echelon mobsters and their inner-city dealers (which inevitably ended in lethal shootouts), there was an investigation of the author’s squad for their malfeasance. Yet the tale abruptly ends with a cleaned-up Unkefer being offered a promotion prior to the DEA's formation, which he refused. “Today there is little recorded history of 90 Church,” he concludes. “The agents did what had to be done.”
Though entertainingly readable in a grimy sort of way, this is more a tangle of sex, violence, and betrayal than a serious true-crime narrative about this little-discussed era.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06733-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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