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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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