A surprisingly compassionate, common-sense guide to controlling crime, from the police chief of Los Angeles. Williams begins with the events of March 1991, when 81 seconds of videotape caught Rodney King being beaten by cops in L.A. Williams, then police commissioner in Philadelphia, privately congratulated himself on his own department, which was running better than it had in years. In June 1992, Williams moved across the country and took charge of the embattled LAPD, and inherited more trouble than he ever imagined. In this simple, straightforward book, Williams outlines the reasons behind the acrimonious relationship between Los Angelenos and their police. Williams, who is black (though he considers himself first and foremost ``blue''), addresses the issue of race by actively encouraging minorities to join the force and by reminding older cops either to accept new faces or leave. Williams is a staunch gun control advocate and a firm supporter of community policing, stands that have helped to decrease tensions in Los Angeles. He illustrates the importance of community policing through examples of arrests gone wrong, and he builds a strong case for streamlining procedures to identify and fire rogue cops. Williams may be quick to punish, but he is also quick to commend and finds much to praise about the LAPD, defending its actions in recent high-profile cases like the investigation of Michael Jackson for sexual misconduct. Williams's style lacks fire, but it is certainly heartfelt. While none of the ideas here are radically new, Williams presents his vision of a police department with enthusiasm and grace, and with the results to back it up.
Pub Date: April 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80277-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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