A shrewd confessional by a knowing veteran—and a helluva cop book.
Archetypal street-smart cop Leuci (Blaze, 1999, etc.) initiates us into the workings of the brotherhood of New York’s finest a generation ago.
And he should know: his experiences as a crooked detective who cooperated in a corruption investigation were the basis for Robert Daley’s Prince of the City (1978). Leuci, a neighborhood guy who spent decades out there, vividly depicts his adventures from the day he first twirled a nightstick. He quickly learned the rules: if it doesn’t fold, don’t take it; never rat out a partner; there is no such thing as a warning shot; show the skels and the yoms who’s in charge. (The text sometimes sounds like cop-bar repartee, but there are explanations for readers who never met a skel or a yom). The author guarded the Beatles. He landed in the heart of a riot. He went undercover as a high-school student scoring drugs and soon was known on the street as “Babyface.” In the vaunted Special Investigations Unit, the scrupulous cop with all the great collars became the bought cop. He made cases and he made money. Dealing with informants, wiseguys, and top-of-the-line narcs, he yearned to surpass the haul in the recent French Connection, much of which went missing. Leuci turned, finally, against the bad cops, fixers, crooked bondsmen, judges, shysters, and the whole corrupt system. He wore a wire and came under the protection of bodyguards as intrigue and danger mounted. Old friends were jammed as he became an important witness. Before being retired, Babyface grew up. It’s a dramatic police story, worthy of Wambaugh presenting with vitality players from Mario Cuomo, Rudy Giuliani, Vinny Albano, and Leuci’s cousin Johnny Tarzan to bimbos, pimps, pushers, made guys, and, especially, lieutenants, sergeants, and all the brothers on the job (generally described as attractive).
A shrewd confessional by a knowing veteran—and a helluva cop book.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-380-97626-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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 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
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