White dog… that’s moonshine, hootch, likker. Who hasn’t dreamed of distilling up a little batch in their basement (What? Is it just me?). It’s also generally illegal. Max Watman, I nice guy I met once (what’s how I learned about his book) has written a gem, Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine.I’m enjoying more than any…
Dan Baum wrote an excellent, award winning, best selling book about New Orleans, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans. He first spent time there as a reporter and writer for the New Yorkerin the days after Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent devastating flood. A few years ago I cold-called (or email) Dan after my wife realized that we…
Two of the best police books out there are little read. Too little read. And top-quality and much more action packed than my book. I’ve written about both these books before, but it can’t hurt writing about them again. Beyond Hope? by Michael East is about policing in Saginaw, Michigan. Unless you live in Saginaw, you probably won’t find it…
I like Amazon.com. I buy a lot of stuff from them. I don’t have a good local independent bookstore. Plus Amazon brings stuff right to my door. For free. But Amazon is a strange a mysterious place. Authors have no website to logon to and check out how many copies they’ve sold. So I got a good feeling I’m not…
One of the nice thing about school being out and traveling a bit is it gives me more time to read books for fun. My favorite genre is probably the travelogue. Mark Twain, P.J. O’Rourke, Paul Theroux? I love them all. And I’ll even define travelogue broadly to include historical fiction, like my favorite books by Louis de Bernières. Even…
I’m sure that just like me, you all are browsing the latest issue of Sociological Forum, the quarterly publication of the Eastern Sociological Society. Hmmm, here’s an article called “Anomie Among European Adolescents: Conceptual and Empirical Clarification of a Multilevel Sociological Concept.” The “results lend strong support to the theoretical construct of anomie as exteriority and constraint.” O-kay… I’ll think…
Maurice Punch has written another excellent book on policing: Police Corruption: deviance, accountability and reform in policing. More than anybody else, Maurice Punch inspired my policing career (well, maybe Punch and John Van Maanen share top prize). Punch’s wonderful and classic study of the Amsterdam Police, Policing the Inner City inspired me into the whole police business, especially my research…
My friend used to joke that the local criminals would come to court “dressed in their best sweat pants.” I was reading a David Sedaris book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, on my flight back from Chicago and came across this passage: There were plenty of things that should have concerned me–the blood-spatter evidence, the trajectory of the bullets–but…
The glorious genre of Cop Lit has many notable contributors. The writing ranges from the driest academic tome to the cheesiest pulp fiction. There a pretty extensive list of police books at police-writers.com. A lot of them are crap. But many are good. Two of the best older police books are Jonathan Rubinstein’s City Police and Joe Poss and Joe…
I just finished reading Maximum City by Suketu Mehta. Best book I’ve read in a while. Non-fiction book about the city of Bombay. Great arm-chair traveling. But some good deep insight, too (and a fair amount about the Mumbai police, too). I loved it.