An unpretentious account of a proud career in service to public safety.
Conversational memoir of the author’s career in the FBI.
Moore is candid about his personal flaws and shortcomings, but most of the book is a love letter to a dangerous career and an agency filled with colleagues he admired. His assignments included counterterrorism, especially after 9/11; operator of a SWAT team that conducted surprise raids; sniper with the highest sharpshooter status; and pilot of FBI aircraft. Despite the dramatic-sounding assignments, Moore emphasizes that a career in the FBI does not involve around-the-clock adventuring; bureaucratic routine is part of the mix. Early in his career, he received a posting to the FBI office in Salt Lake City, an outpost where excitement and even normality sometimes seemed lacking. His first substantial assignment took Moore to rural Idaho, where he was keeping watch on members of a white-supremacist group known for violence. The author does not hide his mistakes due to inexperience and openly admits how fear nearly overcame him at certain moments. As he became more experienced, fear rarely entered his mind; he became an adrenaline junkie. Welcome interludes explore how Moore's career occasionally meshed well with family life, but more often kept him away from his wife and children. The section on how Moore met and romanced the woman he would marry is especially poignant and well-written, while some of the sections about pursuing criminals are less compelling because they contain too much barely relevant detail. When Moore steps back from spinning narratives about tracking specific criminals, he offers fascinating insights.
An unpretentious account of a proud career in service to public safety.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-914090-70-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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