Strange and powerful cop-fact, from a past-master of cop-fiction: the story of ten San Diego police officers assigned to patrol, on foot, at night, the cactus-filled, snake-infested canyons along the Mexican border. Not, however, to intercept aliens illegally entering the country—there were far too many—but to arrest the violent, sadistic bandits who preyed on the defenseless aliens in the canyons, The ten were the Border Alien Robbery Force (with the inevitable acronym), almost all Mexican-Americans, led by the super-macho Sergeant Manny Lopez ("I was bored. Real bored. . . . That's why I joined [the] task force")—who seemed to know no fear and whose men, as time went on, became more and more convinced he was both invulnerable and crazy. ("This bastard would draw on The Holy Ghost!") Night after night, dressed like winos, crawling around in the brush, grappling with "guys with knives and icepicks. . . guys who smelled like garbage," it began to get to the men in the BARF squad. "We were afraid to use our guns at first," said one. "We were still normal policemen." They didn't stay normal long. For one thing, the media found them: "Border shooting! Film at eleven!" Celebrity turned them into The Last of the Gunslingers. ("Think of it: ten little hardball lawmen, shooting down Mexican bandits. . . out there in the cactus and rocks and tarantulas. . . . If that wasn't a John Ford scenario, what the hell was it?"). And they worked hard in off-duty hours (drinking, police groupies) to live up to the image. On the job, they had more shootouts per month than most cops see in a lifetime, and they got crazier and crazier. Even war, thought one, made more sense than "seeking out armed men in the darkness"—the intimacy of it was terrifying. Ultimately they began beating up bandits they lacked cause to arrest, and not giving a damn about anyone or anything. (Manny to a bandit he's shot: "I hope you die of gangrene. . . . I hope it hurts like cancer.") When the bandits wised up and stayed on the Mexican side of the border, the BARFers ignored the international boundary, and an incident in which a Tijuana policeman was shot signaled the beginning of the end of the entire patrol experiment. Ironically, the BARF squad members paid the highest price: broken marriages, psychiatric problems, police careers that fizzled. "Maybe it would take a foreigner," Wambaugh suggests, "to know how typically American it was to thrust ten young men into a monstrous international dilemma with an implied mission to dramatize it." Tough, funny, and moving—with plenty of dead-on cop dialogue.
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 1983
ISBN: 0553763253
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1983
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
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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