A gritty if tasteless and overblown recounting of one honest NYPD detective's investigation of one corrupt NYPD cop. This is hardly the stuff of legend, despite New York Daily News columnist McAlary's (Cop Shot, 1990) insistent invocation of Frank Serpico. Early in 1986, the Field Internal Affairs Unit received a tip that officer Michael Dowd and his partner, Gerald DuBois, serving in the 75th precinct in Brooklyn's East New York section, were ripping off drug dealers. A ``world-class dirtbag,'' according to one cop, Dowd had been involved in a number of disciplinary actions, including being sent to ``the Farm'' for drug and alcohol rehabilitation. ``The first time I saw Michael Dowd,'' said Detective Joe Trimboli, ``I knew he was dirty.'' But Trimboli, known as ``The Watcher,'' failed to prove the more serious allegations, such as snorting cocaine while on duty, accepting bribes, doing chores for drug dealers, and stealing money from prisoners and corpses. Instead, he nabbed Dowd for ``patrol violations,'' such as leaving his assigned area for lunch and wearing his hat backward. Dowd was, however, heavily involved with Joe Adonis, a low-level dealer working for Jose ``Chelo'' Montalvo, a drug lord from the Bronx, and was allegedly receiving $8,000 per week in bribes. Investigators in the DA's office for Suffolk County, Long Island, where Dowd lived, suspected the New York cop was dealing drugs and arrested him in May 1992. Although Trimboli's years of work didn't lead directly to Dowd's downfall, his reports substantiated many of the charges and made a guilty plea inescapable. Dowd was later charged with federal racketeering for accepting the bribes and is serving a 14-year sentence. McAlary's lurid writing—Dowd hung out in a bar where ``the lighting was as weak as the character in the room''—and his sensationalistic attempt to puff up one cop's downfall as indicative of all-pervasive police corruption make this a tough sell. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-89736-5
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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