An astute, unvarnished account that should stand out from the crowd of pro– and anti–law enforcement books.
An impassioned memoir focused on policing’s fraught relationship with communities of color and other marginalized groups.
Writing with Harris, CNN and Wall Street Journal security contributor Horace vividly depicts the surreal challenges faced by African-Americans in law enforcement following a distinguished career: “I’ve been part of the best and worst that my noble profession represents.” Writing with deep knowledge and concern, the author argues that unequal policing based on ingrained racial bias and the drug war is even more pervasive than the attention paid to the Black Lives Matter movement and flashpoints like the killing of Michael Brown would suggest. “Despite claims to the contrary,” writes Horace, “Black Lives Matter is not anticop.” Rather, it is an outgrowth of long-term alienation that white communities fail to perceive, due to disparate approaches to policing that often come to light in cases of brutality. The author focuses on the evolution of tactics relative to the post-1960s war on drugs, agreeing with many scholars that a narrative of punitive enforcement followed by mass imprisonment crippled minority communities following the civil rights era. While his tone is knowing and restrained, he appears anguished by the long-term arc of mistreatment and mistrust within black communities; he looks at specific policies and places, creating a somewhat meandering structure. He notes how Ferguson cops used aggressive tactics to generate revenue for years prior to the Brown killing. He also examines New Orleans to illustrate entrenched departmental corruption that culminated in several notorious police-involved murders. In Chicago, he explores a city in crisis due to intractable violence in segregated neighborhoods and an egregious excessive-force killing followed by a political coverup. There, as elsewhere, he concludes, “African-Americans and Latinos want a leader who will bring more fairness to policing.” Horace includes interviews with other cops, emphasizing diverse outlooks and deepening his perspective effectively.
An astute, unvarnished account that should stand out from the crowd of pro– and anti–law enforcement books.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-44008-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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