In-your-face violence and resilient heroism that leaps off the page.
The life and work of a tireless Compton, Calif. beat cop.
Baker spent his early years living in the Los Angeles suburb of Boyle Heights, a place filled with a variety of ethnicities who had migrated there, primarily Latinos and African-Americans. This integration came in handy when the family relocated to affordable Compton in 1950 and he was sent to Catholic school in nearby Watts. As a white boy, he stood out in the predominately black-populated school, but held his own excelling as a natural athlete. Black gang activity soon dominated the western side of the city, while the white citizens organized themselves in the East. By the time Baker joined the Marines, the Watts riots had broken out and Compton became a war zone, spurring the author to join the Compton Police Department in 1968. Capably tracing his distinguished 18-year career policing “America’s most dangerous city,” the author briskly narrates a cavalcade of harrowing stories as he graduated from a cautious rookie to a respected if battered officer to a seasoned sergeant. Par for the course was the violently bloody, racial gang warfare (Baker offers an expansive historical perspective), rescuing rape victims, drug trafficking and their resultant homicides, rampant gunfighting and the backlash of smug, fearless criminals who threatened law enforcement’s grip over their dominion. Additionally, Baker received a crash course on the inside politics, corruption and nepotism of the police brigade. Academy Award–nominated screenwriter (Nixon, Ali), Rivele (co-author: Lieutenant Ramsey’s War: From Horse Soldier to Guerrilla Commander, 2005, etc.) ably compiled boxes of recordings that Baker created after initially dismissing the offer to tell his life story. The result is an exhaustive, thrilling, ultraviolent story about the endless struggle that the Compton PD (who disbanded in 2000) faced in attempting to prevent the city from “dissolving into chaos.”
In-your-face violence and resilient heroism that leaps off the page.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59687-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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