Entertaining, and likely to hold strong appeal for hip-hop fans.
A former NYPD member teams up with journalist Diehl for a gritty memoir chronicling Parker’s transformation from a regular cop pounding the city streets to a hard-bitten lead detective in the “Rap Intelligence Unit.”
Crime and hip-hop have been inexorably linked ever since the genre emerged from the graffiti-covered New York City streets in the late 1970s. Parker, who grew up in an urban, African-American neighborhood, was an ardent hip-hop fan, but he wound up enforcing the laws flouted by many of the folks creating the music he loved. Delineating this process, and some of his most famous cases, the text at first favors a pulpy prose style, as if the coauthors were paying homage to hack crime fiction. (“Tersely we said our goodbyes. A.J. had other people to call. So did I.”) This affectation is quickly shed as Parker gets down to business, rattling off some visceral recollections of his early days on the force. Hip-hop was on the rise just as his career was kicking into gear, and he soon realized that many of the perps he was dealing with on the streets, such as Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff of the World Famous Supreme Team, were the same guys who were tearing up the charts. Things only escalated from there, and Parker was asked to head up the newly formed Rap Intelligence Unit in the ’90s, a response to the slayings of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. The former cop believes both these cases were solvable, but bungled by the police—a common theme to which Parker returns throughout the book, giving the impression that he was often fighting a lone battle against hip-hop-related crime. In a neat touch, the book ends with a few anecdotes from his post-NYPD career as head of a security firm whose clients are, naturally, some of the biggest figures in the rap world.
Entertaining, and likely to hold strong appeal for hip-hop fans.Pub Date: July 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35251-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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