This book’s accounts of homicide investigations should interest true-crime aficionados, but its attempts at sociological...
A retired Baltimore cop remembers his hair-raising experiences on the force in this debut memoir.
HBO’s television show The Wire and David Simon’s 1991 book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets have previously vividly captured the world of Baltimore law enforcement. Now comes Danko, who served for 25 years in the Baltimore Police Department, with a sometimes-illuminating insider’s view that pays homage to “those who stand between good and evil, the law abiding and the lawless.” The author writes that he feels his profession is underappreciated and sets out to show “how exhausting and demanding the job of police officer is, physically and mentally.” A Baltimore native, Danko joined the police department in 1962 and rose up through the ranks to become a homicide detective. In a city with no shortage of high-crime neighborhoods, he had horrific experiences that he describes in an almost matter-of-fact tone. At one point, for example, he was called to investigate a bad odor coming from an abandoned building; he entered a darkened room, looked down, and realized that “I had just stepped into the chest cavity of what remained of a man.” Another time, in an apartment ridden with cockroaches, he and his partner walked through a tunnel formed by piles of newspapers “as quickly as we could, hunching our shoulders, trying to make smaller targets for our little brown friends.” Danko also provides a graphic account of a serial killer who confessed to murdering three women to “get even for all the disrespect” that he felt women had shown him: “Damn them all! They are all alike,” he chillingly told the detectives. There’s plenty that will interest true-crime fans in Danko’s reminiscences. However, the book is on less sure ground when it attempts to provide sociological analysis, preferring right-wing rhetoric to useful insight: “We have generations sitting around waiting for the [welfare] check in the mail, with no self-pride or initiative,” Danko complains, and the “misguided concepts” of “bleeding heart liberals,” he asserts, have only put criminals back on the street. Although the author’s dedication is admirable, the opinions here sometimes come across as anachronisms, as when he dismisses the uproar over recent police shootings in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere as “a concerted effort to undermine the authority of police officers in the performance of their duties.”
This book’s accounts of homicide investigations should interest true-crime aficionados, but its attempts at sociological analysis fall flat.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-7825-8
Page Count: 406
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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