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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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