All the President’s Men it’s not, but Ruderman and Laker provide a welcome addition to the shelves of books about the...
Two newspaper reporters explain how they broke open police corruption in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia Daily News reporters Ruderman and Laker deliver an All the President’s Men–type book, examining their investigation of police corruption, which began in late 2008 when a law enforcement source suggested that a career criminal named Benny Martinez contact the reporters about illegal activity he had conducted with narcotics officer Jeffrey Cujdik. Martinez would identify alleged drug dealers and users to Cujdik, whose narcotics squad would raid their homes, keeping some of the proceeds for themselves. In addition, one of Cujdik’s colleagues would sometimes assault women at the site of the raids. Eventually, the reporters learned of a related thread of misconduct in which his narcotics squad would burst in on retail storeowners, disabling security cameras while stealing cash and merchandise under the guise of the merchants selling drug-related supplies. Since the stories fearlessly named names, some Philadelphia cops were demoted amid citizen outrage. Ruderman and Laker disclose, however, that none of the police officers ever lost their jobs or faced criminal charges. The newspaper’s investigations eventually garnered the authors the Pulitzer Prize for reporting. All the while, the newspaper was so strapped for cash that it was in and out of bankruptcy proceedings, with its very existence in doubt. In addition to chronicling their journalistic investigations, Ruderman and Laker tell their personal stories, disclosing their workaholic habits, quirky personalities and deep friendship in a breezy writing style that occasionally borders on maudlin. Despite the stylistic distractions, however, the narrative offers an insightful view of high-risk, high-reward investigative journalism, made more poignant by recent severe cutbacks in newsrooms around the country.
All the President’s Men it’s not, but Ruderman and Laker provide a welcome addition to the shelves of books about the mechanics and logistics of journalistic exposés.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-208544-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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