PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewMcCloskey reminds us never to be self-righteous and exonerate ourselves with easy anger when we’re all capable of shortcuts and complicity ... Grisham seems happy playing second fiddle, even as he hits a few wrong notes ... These blunders aside, Grisham does a service by elevating Jim McCloskey, who can inspire all of us to use our privilege in the service of those ensnared in the moral scandal we call a criminal justice system. Freeing the innocent is just the first step.
Ali Winston, Darwin BondGraham
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... an exhaustive case study of policing in the Bay Area city ... By zooming in geographically, but also stretching out their timeline... the authors conjure a sense of chronic tragedy ... While Winston and BondGraham treat some episodes with a granularity that may be of interest only to Bay Area residents, in a way this is a strength of the book: You cannot accuse these reporters of importing outside narratives to fit this community. Every city contemplating the future of its police force could use a book like this.
Rosa Brooks
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewBrooks has an anthropologist’s ear for the language of policing, jumping from the reports full of passive-voice bureaucratese to the darkly humorous, profanity-laden shoptalk. She zips from hilarious descriptions of going to the bathroom while overloaded with clunky gear to bone-dry observations ... Anecdote by anecdote, she builds to a cautious analysis of how \'even normal, careful, lawful policing often ends up compounding devastating social inequalities,\' even if few officers display overt racism. Her style recalls the work of immersion journalists like George Plimpton, Ted Conover and Barbara Ehrenreich—who happens to be Brooks’s mother. Brooks makes this part of the story, nesting in a book on policing a beautifully written mini-memoir about growing up the daughter of a famous activist and writer ... her self-awareness gives her insight into the practical, adrenaline-hungry tendencies that may attract people to police work ... It’s easy to imagine the criticism she’ll get, but her calm, considered tone, grounded in experience, is itself an achievement.
Justin Fenton
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewClearly inspired by The Wire, Fenton populates his narrative with a network of officers, informants and street dealers, all with different motivations and interests. Some of these personalities come through more vividly than others, but the overall effect is to capture the disorienting, churning quality of a city where the good guys and bad guys aren’t easily distinguished ... Favoring hard-boiled reporter’s prose, Fenton mostly emphasizes story over such analysis, but he shows how, in our zeal to combat crime, we have allowed institutions to produce it.
