by James Lardner & Thomas Reppetto ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 23, 2000
A most well-written and evenhanded book on a large and slippery subject, one that officers and civilians alike should find...
Just the Facts: a sprawling, often dramatic account of the New York Police Department that explores the relationship of criminality, corruption, and law enforcement to the developing metropolis.
Lardner (Fast Forward, 1987) and Repetto (a former Chicago detective and longtime president of NYC’s Citizens Crime Commission) take an alluringly long view in considering this alternately romanticized and vilified institution. They begin with a muscular evocation of the developing 19th-century underworld that recalls Luc Sante’s Low Life (1992) in portraying how the depredations of early gangs and the oft-violent strife of immigrant life necessitated the professionalization of the archaic, quasi-voluntary system of “roundsmen” and “constables” that had survived from the colonial era. The rapidly solidfying NYPD was forced to adapt such “modern” measures as uniform investigation and firearms codes, usually in response to large-scale provocations like the Draft Riots of 1863. Ironically, the growth of “professional” policing was always accompanied by entrenched systems of patronage and corruption; the NYPD was Tammany-controlled well into the 1900s. Much of the narrative here demonstrates this unique urban drama: the approximate 20-year cycle in which such corruptions of law enforcement are publicly rooted out, usually in the context of greater political clear-cutting, evidenced by such grisly dramas as the 1970 revelations of Frank Serpico. But this is a colorful rather than a dry civic history: the authors have a fine feel for the textures and minutiae of police drama, conveying the relevance to the NYPD’s development of such long-gone cops as Thomas Byrnes (the 19th-century pioneer of the detective squad), Joseph Petrosino (murdered in Italy while investigating the pre-WWII Mafia), and Sam Battle (the first African-American cop, who responded to his travails with almost unsettling dignity). The authors also successfully evoke the glories and terrors of city life (particularly the eruptions of chaos that periodically raged in Gotham between the 1960s and the 1990s) and the grim emphasis on maximum policing that has followed—leading to notoriously increased friction between the NYPD and the city’s dense minority communities.
A most well-written and evenhanded book on a large and slippery subject, one that officers and civilians alike should find informative and thought-provoking.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-5578-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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