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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heartbreaking, Accurate picture of a Law Enforcement Family,
By A Customer
This review is from: My Father's Gun: One Family, Three Badges, One Hundred Years in the NYPD (Paperback)
As another "cop's Kid" I wasn't sure I wanted to read this book. I put off buying it and then after buying it, I put off reading it because I was too afraid the author might actually succeed in portraying the Dualistic nature of Law Enforcement families: Passionate yet cold as ice, Caring and loyal but unable to reveal that to their own families, loving and yet painfully distant. Brian MacDonald captured all of this and it did break my heart at times to read this book but the reading of it was the cheapest Therapy I've ever paid for since by the end, I felt I had exorcised some of my own demons. However, don't let all this maudlin exposition fool you, this is a tight, very well-written and sparse memoir that succinctly encompasses three generations of "Mick Yorkies" or New York Policemen. As skilled as MacDonald is at presenting the details of how their involvement in the NYPD shaped the lives of his Grandfather, Father and Brother, he also shows with equal justice exactly how that Civil Service provided these Irish men with different social status from generation to generation. That he does so without resorting to the "Dirty Mick" cliches when discussing Tammany Hall is a remarkable accomplishment that most modern and rather Self-hating irishmen of our day cannot avoid in their haste to assert their own rising social status and to distance themselves from their Father's or Grandfather's hard choices after emigrating.In addition to providing the reader with a whirlwind education in the history of the NYPD as well as the history of the Irish in the NYPD, Macdonald also does something quite mystical: He successfully evokes all those Irish Cop Archtypes we grew up with and gives them the weight of real names, true war stories and personal remembrance. At one point I noticed there were tears on my face when something he wrote caused me to vividly recall the smell of my Dad's gun belt and the crinkly sound of its leather as he slid it off and up unto a shelf in a locked closet each night. He also caused me to cry in the last few pages as he offers a faint but sincere apologia for the distance that Cop's keep from their own children when he relates a gut-wrenching incident from his own Brother's troubled relationship with his daughter. All in all, this book is a love-letter I could never write to all the men, and there are many, in my own family that had to leave in the middle of family gatherings to handle some case and to the men who didn't tell us they loved us very often until after they retired because their upbringing and their career-path propelled them in a direction away from open expression of joy and robbed them of some of the contentment that they earned. If you're are a proud son or daughter of a Cop, you'll love this book. If you're an angry son or daughter of a Cop, this book might help you see into their world. That it was written by the son who didn't become a Cop makes it only more poignant since there is no locker-room pride in the Job to distract from the stark but hopeful memoir of the story of thousands of our childhoods. I'd like to thank Brian MacDonald for this, his first book, and beg him to write some more about our peculiar social milieu. I really did think my family must have been the only one who self-segregated into associating only with other Cops' kids and such for a very long time. I also thought my family was the only one to be so two-faced about Law Enforcement where they revere it at all costs but beg their kids not to follow them into it as they had followed their dads. MY FATHER'S GUN gives an overdue voice to this perpetual struggle to live, love and survive within Law Enforcement. With a hankie in hand, I must admit I am glad I allowed myself to be drawn into this book far enough to finish it. If you are at all considering buying this book, do. You will not regret it.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
enjoyable, interesting,
By PO Robinson (stony point, ny United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: My Father's Gun: One Family, Three Badges, One Hundred Years in the NYPD (Paperback)
As a member of NYPD, I have heard alot of talk on this book. also living in Rockland county,(also where the author lived) I can relate to differents points of interest in the book. I living a civil service family life, can compare the different aspects of "the job". My father being an officer of FDNY, me being the first cop. This books goes from the changes in the dept. through scandals and also working now shows what things havent changed. I highly recomend this book to anyone not just cops, it puts in perspective a cops life and what the family endures also. Once you start reading it is a hard book to stop reading, it isn't hard reading the book flows very smooth. I am not reader and for me to read a complete book is good.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It's all in the family.,
By A Customer
This review is from: My Father's Gun: One Family, Three Badges, One Hundred Years in the NYPD (Hardcover)
The subtitle of McDonald's new nonfiction book says it all: "One Family, Three Badges, One Hundred Years in the NYPD." But his family wasn't always a part of the book. At first, McDonald, a 45-year-old Manhattan writer, wanted to compose a traditional history of the NYPD with just a slight twist. "I wasn't going to do it about my family," he told APBnews.com. "I was going to do it about New York City policing being the last bastion of careers handed down over generations." Then he went to an NYPD retirement party where a detective asked the crowd of about 150 how many of them were third-generation officers. About half raised their hands, and a whopping 15 said their police department heritage went back four generations. "I knew I was on to something then," McDonald said, and he decided to turn to his own family as subject material. At the time of his grandfather's service, corruption in the NYPD was epidemic. My Father's Gun is perhaps most vivid in its descriptions of an era at the turn of the century when many lawmen were criminals. Devery, the crooked police captain who owned the city's baseball team, eventually was promoted to chief of police. His inspiring advice to his troops: "When ye're caught with the goods, don't say nothin'." Brutality wasn't uncommon. Police Capt. Alexander "Clubber" Williams once put the law enforcement ethos into words: "There is more law at the end of the policeman's nightstick than in all the decisions of the Supreme Court." "Little things like that give you some idea of what things were like," McDonald said. The NYPD "was unbelievably corrupt and incredibly colorful."
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