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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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