An inspirational, detailed, and informative police account with current relevance.
This memoir chronicles a policewoman’s historic legal battle with the Los Angeles Police Department, challenging institutionalized sexual discrimination.
In 1947, after serving in the Army for five years—and attaining the rank of captain—Blake began the application process to join the LAPD. She received her acceptance to the Police Academy in May 1948 at the age of 27 and walked an LA beat for three years. In addition to the hardship of having to patrol wearing a skirt and heels, women were ordered to carry their guns in their black police purses along with handcuffs. Still, the author liked being on the street. In the ’50s, she was temporarily transferred “to work Lincoln Heights Jail.” This was evidently retaliation for her refusing to resign from the Army Reserves. According to Blake, the LAPD assumed any woman in the military was a lesbian. This was considered even worse than being a woman on the police force. But not long after, all female officers were taken off the street. The book describes the career consequences of this decision: “Preventing women from walking a beat or going out on patrol not only deprived women of that kind of active duty, it deprived them of many job opportunities that required precisely that kind of experience.” After 25 years of trying to effect change from within, the author filed a landmark Title VII lawsuit against the department. Blake’s memoir, heavily edited and reorganized by co-author Gross, focuses primarily on the professional side of the policewoman’s life as well as on her extraordinary seven-year legal fight. That court battle led to a change in police hiring and the promotion of women and minorities throughout the country. But readers are given only a peek into Blake’s tumultuous private life, which included three marriages, alcoholism, and serious health issues resulting from the stress of constant on-the-job harassment. As such, the final product is less a memoir than a valuable—and at times, frightening—documentation of the accepted code of misbehavior safely ensconced behind the “blue wall of silence.” Page after page, readers see Blake enduring in-your-face hostility and quiet snickering with resolve and courage. It makes her ultimate victory that much sweeter.
An inspirational, detailed, and informative police account with current relevance. (foreword, afterword, appendix)Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9998584-8-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Incubation Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.
The bestselling author recalls her childhood and her family’s wartime experiences.
Readers of Winspear’s popular Maisie Dobbs mystery series appreciate the London investigator’s canny resourcefulness and underlying humanity as she solves her many cases. Yet Dobbs had to overcome plenty of hardships in her ascent from her working-class roots. Part of the appeal of Winspear’s Dobbs series are the descriptions of London and the English countryside, featuring vividly drawn particulars that feel like they were written with firsthand knowledge of that era. In her first book of nonfiction, the author sheds light on the inspiration for Dobbs and her stories as she reflects on her upbringing during the 1950s and ’60s. She focuses much attention on her parents’ lives and their struggles supporting a family, as they chose to live far removed from their London pasts. “My parents left the bombsites and memories of wartime London for an openness they found in the country and on the land,” writes Winspear. As she recounts, each of her parents often had to work multiple jobs, which inspired the author’s own initiative, a trait she would apply to the Dobbs character. Her parents recalled grueling wartime experiences as well as stories of the severe battlefield injuries that left her grandfather shell-shocked. “My mother’s history,” she writes, “became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me….Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them.” Winspear also draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64129-269-6
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
