A swashbuckling book that is likely to elicit extreme reactions of applause or disapproval depending on the reader’s...
A retired New York Police Department detective relates the saga of his adolescence in New York City, his chance decision to join the force, his storied career (1970-1984), and the serious injury that forced his retirement.
Written with former NYPD officer and Army machine-gunner Picciarelli (co-author: Undercover Cop: How I Brought Down the Real-Life Sopranos, 2013, etc.), this anecdote-driven, loosely organized memoir celebrates what most cops might consider “the good old days” but what some civilians might consider a celebration of excessive force. Friedman used his fists, guns, and other available weapons to arrest, wound, and sometimes kill suspects, winning a host of medals for valor in the process. Although the memoir contains sporadic reflections on whether Friedman needed to use deadly force as often as he did, the book largely consists of unreflective war stories about New York’s perpetual criminal element, especially in neighborhoods dominated by nonwhite populations. The author does not worry about political correctness, stereotyping, or reliance on stylistic clichés. His empathy for fellow police officers wounded or killed on the job is boundless—not so for most others in the narrative. Much of Friedman’s commentary involves his desired assignment in the city’s 41st Precinct, a small area of the South Bronx sometimes referred to as “Fort Apache.” Readers can only wonder how Friedman would have fared in today’s climate of police officers wearing body cameras and vehicle dashboard cameras to document on-the-job conduct and citizens using phone cameras to record law enforcement personnel. When not on the street making arrests, Friedman chafed at completing paperwork and milling around courthouses waiting to testify. His restlessness for action never abated, to the point where he placed himself in personal peril multiple times.
A swashbuckling book that is likely to elicit extreme reactions of applause or disapproval depending on the reader’s personal opinions about law enforcement.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10690-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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