by Lawrence J Rupp ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 11, 2014
Bracing, eventful cop-talk memoir that’s politically in the Duck Dynasty neighborhood.
Veteran LA police officer Rupp files his personal and highly opinionated report of a long career patrolling the region’s most violent ghettos and compromised precincts.
Like a drill instructor terrorizing cadets on their first day—which he has done—first-time author Rupp isn’t really all that bad, but he puts his political opinions right up front. In no fewer than 180 chapters, this memoir covers his decades as a lawman patrolling the roughest slum districts of Compton, Watts, Lynwood and South Central Los Angeles from the late 1960s to the ’90s, usually as part of the Sheriff’s Department, with a sideline in training new recruits. He loved the job, even when it put him in the center of protests, office back-stabbing and racially tinged “terrorism” by militants such as the Black Panthers. The writer despises the news media for stereotyping police brutality and turning criminals into victims. He has no sympathy for street gangs and their apologists; he refuses to identify the distinct “youth groups” by name, as that would show too much respect. He doesn’t care for behind-the-scenes power blocs, and he hates the hemp-heads pushing for marijuana legalization. He does support suspect profiling. The title references the adage that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc. Just replace “duck” with a shifty black youth in sagging pants with a gun stuck in the waistband when a robbery has just been committed, and you’ll get the picture. (“Check the unskewed stats,” he says.) However, Rupp says a lot of people won’t get the picture, and he offers the scoop that municipalities (Compton especially) have fudged crime stats. Some of his non-PC contrarianism is sublime: Rupp defends Michael Vick, since dogfights for sport are routine in the ’hood, and if that’s the worst thing Vick’s ever done, then he’s a much better man than most “thugs” recruited as pro athletes. Rupp’s youthful job apprenticeship as a meat-cutter helped him get through the gruesome stuff, but the memoir isn’t all heavy and horror. He describes going undercover to spook the “lingering transient homosexuals” out of an established gay neighborhood; his post-retirement bodyguarding for celebrities, including the Dixie Chicks; and on-the-job pranks as ritual hazing for superiors and cadets alike. Behind the name-calling, score-settling and tributes to fallen comrades, one senses that Rupp speaks truth when he says he doesn’t care what color people are as long as they act as responsible, respectful citizens. Though when it comes to liberals, he considers his mission “to irritate you and the rest of your kind.” So-called “effeminate lackeys” are especially likely to close this case.
Bracing, eventful cop-talk memoir that’s politically in the Duck Dynasty neighborhood.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495427305
Page Count: 566
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Emmanuel Carrère translated by Linda Coverdale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2011
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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