A fast-paced but toothless report on the crime-busting years of America's toothiest politician: scads of atmosphere and action, no critical bite. Jeffers, who has written histories of Scotland Yard (Bloody Business, 1992) and the FBI, turns here to the fin-de-siäcle New York City Police Department, an organization rotten with corruption. Tammany Hall bosses pull the strings; promotion is based on patronage rather than merit; many on the 3,600-man force supplement their wages with blackmail, intimidation, and hush money. Into this mess strides the Rough Rider himself, Teddy Roosevelt—naturalist, sportsman, writer, Harvard grad—appointed president of the police commission in 1895. A self-described surgeon out to excise a festering gangrene, Roosevelt applies the scalpel mercilessly. He introduces merit promotions, bike patrols, and pistol training, hires the department's first woman employee, updates the telephone system, and enforces the laws with righteous vigor. Jeffers makes much of Roosevelt's famous smile, stocky build, courage, and gusto; one looks in vain for a wart in this worshipful portrait. There is a second hero to share the limelight: Jacob Riis, born in poverty—here playing a predictable pauper to Roosevelt's prince—whose newspaper exposÇs of social ills alert Roosevelt to the problems of the city's sordid underside. The clichÇd characters aren't enhanced by Jeffers's melodramatic prose, which features such tired phrases as ``mysterious characters'' and ``eagle-eyed sleuths.'' Spirited accounts of police busts, steamy bordellos, and the like juice the action but never overcome the sense that this is a bully boy's adventure story enacted by grown- ups. (For a more scholarly tour of the 19th-century New York demimonde, see Eric Homberger's Scenes from the Life of a City, p. 904). Jeffers inverts Teddy's most famous saying with a book that walks loudly (lots of swaggering by the protagonist and others) and carries a small stick (nary a whack of dissent).
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-02407-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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