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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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