A swift-moving history of and tribute to officers who are “out there at all hours of the day and night, kicking down doors,...
The story behind the country’s oldest law enforcement agency, the U.S. Marshals service, as told by its former associate director for operations Earp, with veteran co-author Fisher (co-author, with Tom Coughlin: Earn the Right to Win, 2013, etc.).
In this real-life version of the TV series America's Most Wanted, Earp explores the service known around the world for heroes like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and significant events like the Shootout at the O.K. Corral and its development over the years since its formation in 1789. Established during the administration of George Washington as the police force of the federal court system, the service has a unique function in American law enforcement, and this function has been transformed—especially since the Reagan administration—as tough-on-crime policies have increased demands on law enforcement agencies. The marshals' mandate extends across the whole republic. They are empowered to deputize agencies of federal and local government—e.g., the U.S. Forest Service, parole officers and others—to aid their operations. Anyone who has run out on a warrant for arrest, skipped court appointments, broken parole or work-release agreements, broken out of jail or comes under one of their prioritized categories of criminal can find themselves the target of pursuit. Earp recounts how such infamous figures as Panama's Gen. Manuel Noriega and Puerto Rican terrorist William Morales were brought to justice. The author describes their investigative methods, especially their mastery of modern technology to identify, locate and track down their targets. Each aspect of the narrative is introduced through its own kind of action story and brings to life the dangers and rewards of a deputy's life. Earp's tales are educational, and he highlights the ingenuity and training required to become a U.S. Marshal.
A swift-moving history of and tribute to officers who are “out there at all hours of the day and night, kicking down doors, stopping vehicles, and arresting heinous fugitives.”Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-222723-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
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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