by Eric J. Caron ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2018
An often engaging chronicle of a dramatic career.
A retired U.S. Customs agent recounts an eventful career and the lessons that he drew from it.
Debut author Caron was born in 1965, a fraternal twin and one of seven siblings raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In this memoir, he says that his police officer father, Edmond, was a strict disciplinarian who instilled a relentless work ethic and a sense of moral responsibility. As a child, Caron suffered from hearing and speech impairments that undermined his academic performance, and his parents decided that, instead of a standard high school, he would be better off attending a vocational school, concentrating on culinary arts. However, the author was determined to follow in his father’s footsteps and enter law enforcement—a commitment that only intensified after Edmond died of a heart attack in 1981. After Caron’s graduation from a local community college, he worked as a summer officer in Massachusetts and decided that he wasn’t ideally suited for police work. Instead, he attended Northeastern University to study criminal justice in preparation for becoming a special agent, and in 1989, he became a U.S. Customs agent, assigned to Newark, New Jersey. The author vividly describes an illustrious career that culminated in his becoming the representative at the U.S. National Central Bureau of Interpol in Washington, D.C. He also openly discusses his personal travails, including the sudden death of his twin brother, his struggles with PTSD after a colleague was shot, and the toll that his career took on his family life before he retired in 2014. Caron worked in many different capacities as a customs agent—he assisted the Secret Service on protective details, helped the CIA conduct an internal investigation, and investigated drug smuggling operations—and his adventures make for a rousing read. The author’s writing is clear but occasionally awkward and overly earnest. For example, when pondering the obligations of his job, he thinks to himself: “I may actually be required to take a life based on the totality of the circumstances!” However, Caron’s remembrances are often thrilling, and the advice he imparts is largely sound, if shopworn.
An often engaging chronicle of a dramatic career.Pub Date: April 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4575-6353-9
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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