Amusing recollections of “The Job” with some insider details, but it’s unlikely to stand out among a recent flood of law...
The memoir of an Irish-American's service with the New York Police Department, told with equal parts Gaelic charm and cop cynicism.
Dublin-bred Waters, who returned to Ireland following his 2011 retirement, details his swift rise through the ranks, from patrolling a boring Manhattan precinct to working major drug and gang investigations in the high-crime South Bronx, even as his comrades were bemused by New York’s legendary drop in violent crime. As he writes in comparing his brother officers to the wily professional criminals they pursue, “it’s about the game, the chase…[and] the cash hidden in some bus station locker or locked away in a pension plan at the end of your career.” Waters is surprisingly frank about the seamier side of big-city policing, starting with his own years as an illegal immigrant, about which he deceived the department. He portrays drug enforcement as a high-stakes scheme for accruing officer overtime and federal dollars, and he admits that Irish ancestry still aids one’s rise within the department. He avers that “although I made plenty of mistakes, I never took a dime I wasn’t entitled to, never set a perp up for a crime he did not commit,” and he expresses scorn for the few truly crooked cops he encountered. Waters details intriguing street scenes from his time in an anti-pickpocketing unit, followed by postings in Narcotics and Homicide, but the most powerful section concerns his experiences at ground zero following 9/11 (even detectives were assigned to sift remains). The author has the droll voice of a raconteur, but the casually organized narrative can seem unfocused. He discusses some major investigations, but Waters focuses more on his own career trajectory, up until its abrupt conclusion after more than 20 years: “There are a lot of fantasies when you join the NYPD, but few fanfares when you exit the stage.”
Amusing recollections of “The Job” with some insider details, but it’s unlikely to stand out among a recent flood of law enforcement memoirs.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1901-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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