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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
