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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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