Despite their anecdotal nature, these punchy policing tales seem provocatively true to life.
Raucous recollections from a career as a New York City cop, from a veteran of The Moth storytelling series.
Osborne retired in 2003 as the commander of the Manhattan Gang Squad after 20 years of service, yet he seems more aligned with the street cop’s earthy brotherhood than with the authority of command: “It’s a good feeling knowing that you belong to a family [and] also the biggest and baddest gang in the city.” Although his narrative approach is generalized rather than focused on concrete case histories, the author portrays a rough arc of the transformation of New York City from the decay and constant crime of the early 1980s to the historic crime reductions followed by the greater horror of 9/11 (at which he was present). In explaining his post-retirement interest in storytelling, he writes, for “twenty years my family and friends really didn’t understand what I did for a living.” The son of a tough cop himself, Osborne seemingly never considered any other life. Tonally, he comes off as an avuncular, world-weary tough guy, embodying the “cops know best” attitude that many find alienating. Yet he elevates his perspective by displaying empathy for the civilians, victims and even criminals he has encountered, drawing complex lines between the “lost souls” and “evil motherfuckers” of the underworld. The book has a light, episodic structure, with most chapters built around a less-understood aspect of policing (the weird dynamics of midnight tours or elite anti-crime units) or a dramatic street scene (a near riot in Washington Square Park). Osborne is often humorous, although some readers may find him frank to the point of cynicism: “People like to think cops are racists and only lock up minorities….After being a cop for a few years, you learn to dislike people equally.”
Despite their anecdotal nature, these punchy policing tales seem provocatively true to life.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53962-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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