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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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