by Robert Cole with Jan Hogan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007
A sobering read from another lost front.
Think the insurgents are bad news? Try Iraq’s government—and its police.
In 2004, retired California cop Cole took a civilian contractor gig (he lets slip that it paid $350 a day) in Iraq to train police forces throughout the country in modern crime-suppression techniques. The task bore a steep learning curve for all concerned; as he relates, his teaching began at the most elementary level with such things as handcuffing a suspect and stepping aside after pounding on a door to avoid getting shot from the other side. Stateside cops usually don’t have to contend with IEDs and suicide bombs, and thus Cole finds himself acquiring skills he had not needed before. His memoir of a year in-country is steeped in cultural insensitivity (for instance, he likens the blended sounds of muezzin calls to prayer coming from different mosques as “the equivalent of a really bad garage-band playoff”), and civil libertarians will recoil upon learning that the training manual dispenses with the niceties of Miranda and “all those sissy-ass disciplines you had to follow your entire career” in favor of some good old shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later frontier justice, which apparently is all a “suspicious character” deserves in Iraq. But Cole’s bluster and bravado erode; the cops, the “IP,” may be wildly incompetent, but at least some of them are brave enough to stand up and fight for their country, even if Cole has to convince them to dispense with prayer during duty hours on the Hobbesian grounds that setting down a weapon is inviting death. Now stationed in Haiti, Cole concludes that it’s just not working: Too many cops are needed, the Iraqi government is too corrupt and the conditions are too dangerous: “You could take fifty of the best cops in Sacramento and send them to Baghdad and have them police the streets, and they’ll be dead in a week.”
A sobering read from another lost front.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59102-559-9
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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