An insightful look at the world of criminal investigation.
A memoir of a law enforcement agent’s illustrious career, including his role in the investigation of Mafia crime boss John “Junior” Gotti.
Debut author Perrotta was born in 1967 in Mount Vernon, New York, the child of Italian immigrants. He was a rambunctious child—at 13 he stole his father’s revolver to intimidate some local toughs. His parents eventually purchased a deli—the consummation of the American dream—and working there provided the author valuable practice honing the observational skills central to his later investigative work. After graduating from Fordham University with a degree in political science and a philosophy minor, he received an Army commission as a second lieutenant. He trained in, among other things, military intelligence. Perrotta landed a job with the Bronx County District Attorney’s Detective Investigators Bureau and was eventually assigned as a special investigator to the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, where he participated in the pursuit of infamous organized crime boss John “Junior” Gotti. This chapter in the author’s life is the dramatic centerpiece of the narrative, and Perrotta chronicles his role in the investigation—including surveillance and wiretapping techniques—in microscopic detail. The author joined the Secret Service in 1995, investigating financial crimes like check forgery as well as providing protective services to high-level political figures. He was also sent on various missions to Italy and Bulgaria. Perrotta discusses the culture of the Secret Service like an anthropologist—the hierarchies that form within the agency, the kinds of watches worn and luggage used, and the tension between the investigative and protective details. The author writes in straightforward, clear, but also lively prose, delivering anecdotes with both precision and friendly informality. His career is a genuinely fascinating one—cinematically gripping—and much of the remembrance reads like a true-crime drama. The author covers so much ground in a single volume that the material following the Mafia investigation, while thrilling in its own right, seems anticlimactic in comparison to the battle with Gotti.
An insightful look at the world of criminal investigation.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4787-6125-9
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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