Former NYPD deputy commissioner Maple reveals in a tough, funny memoir the radical anti-crime strategies he deployed in achieving unprecedented reductions in violent crimes throughout New York City, returning the murder rate to pre-1964 levels. The currently rotund, foppish Maple learned his trade in the oft-disparaged Transit Police during the legendary high-crime 1970s and 1980s, when, perversely, he was upbraided by superiors for his guile and aggression in making street-level collars of the “mopes—’scam artists, robbers, pimps—who infested midtown at that time. Now he writes the way he once chased down skells: with a hard-charging mix of incongruous high-life carousing (waiting at Elaine’s for high-priority crime calls), “zany” recollections of the street, and bursts of innovative law-enforcement theory that, if fractious, grow upon the reader. Maple pioneered the first subway “decoy squad” (cops posing as easy victims); his star later rose under the rigorous and publicity-minded Commissioner William Bratton, for whom Maple quietly enacted measures that literally changed the moribund structure of the NYPD and its investigative procedures (e.g., he demanded hard pursuit of thousands of “failed-to-appear” warrants and in-depth debriefing of all arrests for additional crime knowledge), and resulted in a huge increase in street-level crime prevention, as anyone since busted for “quality-of-life violations” now knows. Although Maple is his own best advocate, claiming his methods en grande could reduce crime nationally to pre-1961 levels, he fortunately appears in his own tale not as swell- headed, but as a slightly absurdist cop figure who outthought his own macho, constricted occupational culture. This quality, as well as Maple’s original perceptions regarding criminal predators, whom he portrays in simultaneously funny and unsettling fashion, elevates The Crime Fighter far above the blustery standard of law-enforcement memoirs. As Maple the consultant does not, presumably, work on the cheap, one could seriously recommend his book to law- enforcement professionals who are willing to think creatively and work overtime in facing their own criminal morasses.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-49363-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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