Will appeal to readers curious about the undercover lifestyle and the inner workings of federal law enforcement.
Propulsive, contrarian tale of an undercover specialist for the FBI.
Recently retired, McGowan uses his memoir, co-authored by Pezzullo (co-author: Full Battle Rattle, 2018, etc.), as a victory lap of sorts, recording his experiences in the high-stakes world of federal undercover law enforcement. As he said to a colleague, “I’m really good at pissing people off.” This frankness informs reflections on his early years and on discovering his high-stakes specialty: “Green and unskilled, I was still completely hooked on undercover work.” He portrays his inspiration sharply, chronicling his hardscrabble childhood in New England, where his father was a tough, alcoholic patrolman. McGowan entered the elite ranks of the FBI following formative years as a patrol officer and then detective. He scored an early undercover coup by securing a huge deal with a heroin smuggler, but his career was nearly derailed when he was framed for theft of the evidence: “I’d gone from FBI Golden Boy, to Public Enemy #1, back to Golden Boy.” Though he writes clearly of the nitty-gritty of complex federal investigations, he remains unforgiving of opponents, including both criminals and the upper echelons of the FBI, many of whom he clearly feels jockey for power from behind desks while tougher agents like himself take risks and build cases on the streets. He details major cases where he infiltrated the ranks of Russian mobsters and Mafiosi and shows how the FBI uses wiretaps, informants, and undercover agents to cajole admissions of wrongdoing from high-level suspects. “These guys might be cold blooded killers, but they were also fun to be around,” he writes. McGowan can come off as arrogant, with axes to grind against supervisors he clashed with, particularly regarding an elite national squad who went up against a Mexican cartel but then was abruptly disbanded. Still, this case and others give his recollections the tang of authenticity.
Will appeal to readers curious about the undercover lifestyle and the inner workings of federal law enforcement.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13665-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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