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JIMMY THE WAGS

STREET STORIES OF A PRIVATE EYE

Wagner represents a dying breed in contemporary law enforcement: the maverick, street-schooled, older cop who winds up operating within and beyond legal boundaries. His antic memoir of high times and a hard fall as a P.I., while simply plotted and occasionally clichÇd, provides an entertaining, perceptive study of moral ambiguity and the secret underworld of urban violence. Wagner retired after 22 years as a decorated New York cop, and what started as a simple pension augmentation soon transformed him into a flashy player in the intentionally obscure world of security consulting. The episodic narrative depicts various exploits in which he protects coked-up Saudi princes and turncoat gunrunners, conducts illegal rescues of children spirited abroad in custody disputes, and troubleshoots an upscale strip club that draws the unwelcome attentions of the Mob. This structure feels casual and sometimes even tacked together, but it must be said that many of the episodes are tense and exciting, particularly the chaotic commando-style raids of the child rescues and a scary fistfight between Wagner and a Russian hit man that recalls an Elmore Leonard interlude. The prose is workmanlike, but the book satisfies with its acute details and Wagner’s caustic wit As cops privately will, Wagner crudely skewers most everyone in his way: inept FBI agents, Mafia goombahs, stool pigeons and their harridan wives. Yet his capacity to note the subtle absurdities of situations both banal and dangerous elevates this above the level of mere dreary war stories. Jimmy the Wags is also distinguished from the recent slew of middle-aged career-crash memoirs by the experienced eye it turns upon the unsettling relationship between real cops, private security, and the professional crooks who are their supposed adversaries. Serious students of criminal justice and casual true-crime fans alike will thus find more than just entertainment here.

Pub Date: May 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-688-16511-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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