Blue Blood

Rating:
Summary: Oh, the Stories He Tells!
Review: Ed Conlon is a Detective with the New York City police Department. His trials and tribulations within the Police Department are skillfully told in his book "Blue Blood". This is a book of truths, of his life before and after. His great grandfather was a New York City Policeman with a dubious reputation. His father worked for the NYPD and later for the FBI, and his uncle, Eddie was a New York City Cop. Ed Conlon loved his dad. He was a disciplinarian, but a loving father who wished the best for his son. Uncle Eddie was a hero to Ed and his father. Police work was in the blood of Ed's paternal family, and he joined that great fraternity.

It was not until Ed was a little older, after he graduated from Harvard, that Ed decided to join the police force. His time in the Police Academy, and his exploits as a new Police graduate are well documented. Throughout the book, Ed Conlon writes about the NYPD with pride and with a fresh face. These may be stories well known by other policemen, the same type of "things" that they may have gone through, but these experiences have not been as well written and documented as they are in "Blue Blood".

Ed Conlon tells us about his time walking the beat in South Bronx to his job with the elite Narcotics squad. He shares his experiences on the street- how to talk to the people he works for, how to gain their trust and how to really do the job. He has many tales of life in narcotics- his informants and how they came to be. His tales are funny at times and sad and gritty many times. He becomes fond of his informants and his colleagues. Tales of how they coped with their professional lives that were often times filled with tragedy and horrid black holes.

Ed Conlon shares the experiences of 9-11, the horror of that day and the aftermath. He was a newly promoted Detective, and he was in the office writing up a report when the first plane hit. His group of officers went to Ground Zero and worked the bucket brigade. They were then assigned to Fresh Kills Landfill, to go through the debris and look for bodies, black boxes and other evidence, whatever it was that was found. He had no famiy or close friends that were killed or injured, but he had plenty of useful stories and lots of memories. Ed had several uncles who had small resturants or shops in the Twin Towers- none of them were there that early in the day- they had all been saved.

Ed Conlon finally had his Detective Promotion Ceremony. Because it was so close to 9-11 he was one of the few who smiled during the ceremony. Edward Conlon has two professions one as New York City Police Detective, and the other as a writer. It appears that he is very skilled at both. I loved this book, the writing is superb and kept me engrossed. For a first novel, Edward Conlon has written a book to be celebrated. prisrob

Rating:
Summary: Rich story. Well told.
Review: This book is a terrific mix of real life cop drama, a history of New York and its storied police department, and a memoir of a young man that's made some unconventional choices in his life.

As a small businessman I was struck by Mr. Conlon's description of the frustrations of bad supervisors. I don't know why it surprised me that large public bureaucracies would behave much in the same manner as large companies, but that is made perfectly clear. There is a leadership lesson here, and probably most surprising to Mr. Conlon, business value in the telling of his story.

Mr. Conlon exemplifies all that we hope the police to be - committed, smart, caring people. My daughters have been taught to wave to the police because it's my hope that someone like Mr. Conlon is waving back.

Rating:
Summary: Dull, contrived, and boring
Review: I love to read and rarely put down a book. This is one of the exceptions! What amazes me is how this book received such great reviews. I guess can't trust anyone writing reviews in a newspaper . This is a book written by an individual who probably believes is superior to others and thus the book comes out as highly contrived - which would be OK if it were readable. Unfortunately, this is a dull, dull, dull reading.

Rating:
Summary: Never Ending, Needs Editing, but some of it shines...
Review: After reading the reviews of Detective COnlon's book, I was very excited to read it. It was promised an inside look at life as a cop and I love book about crime, criminals, and the everyday heroes who pursue them. This book was far too long. While it follows a general chronological narrative, the stories meander and jump between family history, city history, and present day without much warning. Even worse, the stories about cases and informants tend to shift midstream. It was also very hard to keep people straight--an index might have helped. Some parts seemed endless. However, other parts, particularly the last 100 pages about 9/11 and Ed's rise to detective are far more involving. I wonder if perhaps the mismash of styles was designed to frustrate, much as the Job has frustated Conlon. These men are almost all heroes and Conlon shows the day to day to frustrations better than any book I've read about policing. However, it could have been about 200 pages shorter.

Rating:
Summary: The essence of "guy-ness" ,,, & Worth Reading
Review: I just finished this book - it is definitely worth reading. As someone who loves the "cops & robbers" shows, it is nice to read something that communicates the extent of boredom and detail-work and petty hassles that we know go on in anyone's workplace, but are romanticized/proceduralized out of film, tv & mysteries.

I was most struck by what a "guy" this guy is --- so what if he went to Harvard and is a New Yawker -- that is MUCH less who he is than the complete guyness of the book. To me, he conveyed the sense that there's a bubba somewhere inside; all the little things that motivate him seem to be so typically guy. And I can't say typically male, because that's not it. It's both more junior high, and more dependable, than that.

Minor points -- I think it needed more cutting, I was confused about who was who a little too often, why is everyone who hasn't lived half their lives yet writing a memoir? (okay, so there's an audience, I bought it after all,.... but on some level it is the same old self-indulgent I-am-the-center-of-the-world thing)

Anyway, I liked it. I'm glad there are people who choose to be cops, even though that was not my choice or the choice of anyone that I am close to.

Rating:
Summary: Street-wise, heartfelt and thoughtful
Review: With nine years as a cop in the Bronx, where he also lives, Harvard-educated Conlon puts his heart and soul into this impassioned, detailed portrait of the Job, in all its warts and glory. From housing-project patrol to gold-shield detective, from chasing junkies to sifting through 9/11 rubble at Fresh Kills landfill, Conlon reveals the daily round of a cop's life.

His maternal great-grandfather was a New York City cop, his father was FBI and his uncle was a cop, as were the fathers of many of his friends, so the career choice might not seem so odd for this Bronx-born Irish kid with a couple of small-time arrests in his hell-raising youth, to go along with his Harvard diploma.

But his rakish forefather had left his wife and kids. The cop life - with its air of graft and glad-handing - was not in good odor among his mother's gentle family. His father came from a big, brawling Bronx family. He knew a lot of cops and wanted something quieter and more lucrative for his son.

But the Job, which encompassed so many different personalities, "offered entry into a drama as rich as any in Shakespeare. And I didn't want to hear the story as much as I wanted to tell it, and I didn't want to tell the story as much as I wanted to join it."

Conlon started out with ambitions as a writer and was an English major at Harvard. But reading this book with its rich, articulate prose and vivid anecdotes, its soul-searching arguments and sharp insight, its sprawling grasp and its seamless organization - what comes to mind is adrenaline. Cops, you realize, become cops for the rush, the hunt, the intensity.

Conlon starts out patrolling the projects in the South Bronx, a place synonymous with crime, but filled with ordinary families just trying to get by. Not that Conlon sees a lot of those people, except in passing.

His encounters are with people at their most desperate; criminal or victim. He might jump from disarming an abusive husband to arresting a drug-peddling junkie to saving a bedridden, half-starved old woman with maggots living in her bedsores, or rescuing two mentally ill tenants from their truly deranged and suddenly vicious cat.

The last two (the first horrific, the second hilarious) are among the Aided calls Conlon describes - the most frequent type of call, in which assistance is what's required, not arrest. Arrests, though desirable, at least to Conlon, are tricky and time-consuming, given the atmosphere of distrust. Paperwork and butt-covering are a necessary hindrance in Conlon's view, a subject to which he returns often in the course of the book.

But this early section, before Conlon moves on to the more exciting (for him, not necessarily the reader) street-drug squad, is full of the groping and learning that goes on in a young cop's mind. Conlon shows us how cops learn to read people; the nuanced psychology that becomes almost automatic in response to a wide range of potentially explosive, tragic or just messy situations.

The drug stuff, in contrast, is a round-robin dance between cop and criminal, in which cops collar street-dealers, keeping them off the street for an hour or so and disrupting the block's drug trade for somewhat less than a minute. Conlon argues for the work, but the squandering of hours in waiting for transport or pushing paper seems to underscore the waste of vast amounts of money in a toothless street-level drug policy. Even the occasional deal for a bigger score almost always peters out in a waste of time for everyone concerned.

Conlon sets the Job in context, giving us a cop's eye view of an anti-social Serpico and an overzealous Knapp Commission, the shock of the Abner Louima abuse case and the tragedy of the Amadou Diallo killing, compounded, in his view, by political abandonment at the top.

His account of combing the 9/11 remains at Fresh Kills (originally published in the "New Yorker," as were several other pseudonymous pieces on the cop's life) conveys the shock, and the gut-wrenching, tactile and olfactory sense of being there.

His own ambitions he treats with both self-deprecating humor and pride. Offered a promotion that sounds like a desk job, he's afraid to refuse. "Like a lot of outer-borough street cops, I believed in some inconvertibly primitive place in my heart that there was a catapult on the roof of One Police Plaza, and that if you crossed someone who was influential, they launched you through the air to Staten Island, where you landed on the pavement in a uniform that was too small, and you spent the remainder of your career on a corner, watching empty buses pass."

And later: "In spite of everything, I learned how a case broke: someone said something, someone left something, someone saw something. None of these occurred at the behest of the detective. Few perps were as accommodating as the man who choked and robbed a woman on the street and was trying to drag her into an alley when a Good Samaritan intervened, driving him off. The perp dropped some papers, which included a snapshot of himself, and a note with his address that said, 'Directions to my house.'"

But the meat of the book is the camaraderie of team work, the rush of a successful collar, the disappointment of a DA's dismissal of same, the good bosses and bad, the never-ending, oft-resented, sometimes contradictory rules, and the personalities that drive it all - perps and cops. Conlon unabashedly thrives on the drama, while aware that the Job can take over the man (or woman), which might not be such a good thing.

Big, funny, sad, horrifying, street-wise and thoughtful, this is a stirring portrait of a man, an institution, and a calling.

Rating:
Summary: An Awesome Book
Review: This book is great! The author is my fathers best friend and all of the people that i know that have also read it said that it is agreat book. I am so glad that Eddie got to right a book. It gives a lot of detail about what a cop has to go through, and it gives the real stuff; not some stuff you see on tv or in the movies. By the way........ my father is PK!!

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: I read cover-to-cover. Those looking for a shallow, fast-paced, linear, simple police story, don't look here. This book is packed with detail, packed with life, crazy characters and sad stories, and happy. This is a cop's life, one cop, not meant to be a comprehensive encyclopedia of the cop life in NYC or anywhere else. There have been a lot of ignorant reviews on this site, such as the one from the moron who didn't realize that Regis High School is a Jusuit school that offers tuition free high-quality education FREE to promising Catholic young men from NYC, like Conlon. It's a sign of his striving but modest Catholic, NYC, NYPD background, idiot, not of some educationally exclusive background. And of course the publisher uses Harvard as a selling point. 20% or more fewer books were bought in 2003 than in 2002 and you think a publisher isn't going to do everything possible to sell its product? The questions for a REAL reviewer to ask are: what is the text like, does it do what it sets out to do, is it true, is it sublime, interesting? NOT, how can I pretend to be a savvy marketing deconstructionist because I, too, realized that they were using some cheap selling points, and got my own class and educational insecurity hot buttons rubbed. Just as the fact that he went to Harvard doesn't automatically make it a good book, so the fact that he went to Harvard doesn't automatically make it slumming. If these people had actually read the book they would know that. And no his agent didn't do a bad job; his agent got him a million dollars. What, it's bad to get a client a high advance because it might induce jitters? Oooh, heaven forbid. Should agents try to keep their authors earning little money so they feel less pressure? I swear, I have rarely seen such a lively conglomeration of pathetic prejudice and pettiness all in one spot.

Rating:
Summary: So much hype, such boring book
Review: Although I love reading cop books, I could not even finish reading 20 pages. I thumbed through the book, hoping to find some gems - no success. This is a Contrived, pretentious, and a poorly written book. I am not suggesting that Mr. Conlon can't write, he does. Unfortunately, the book is extremely dull and boring. I was surprised at the tremendous hype (read the reviews by Ted Conover in the NY Times and John Miller in the LA Times) in the media over this book. Obviously big publishers can get positive reviews done for mediocre work too.

The only selling point is the author's Harvard degree, but I have read much better memoirs from cops without degrees.

Rating:
Summary: A book about the things that cops forget every day
Review: I am a New York City Police Department sergeant with a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Dartmouth College and a master's from Harvard University. I attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City prior to college. You could imagine that the release of this book was intrigued me, and I bought it to see how Ed Conlon's experiences compared to mine.

Having worked in many of Brooklyn's busiest areas since 1997 (East Flatbush, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Brownsville, etc: the 067, 070, 071 and 077 Precincts), I can say that Conlon's relation of New York City street life is both colorful and accurate. He expertly relates the boredom of endless waiting for something to happen, the general futility of most of our efforts, and a mistrust of the public that stems from its inability to feel, firsthand, what a cop feels when he has to make the most important decisions of his life, with the future of citizens in his hands.

One thing that is missing from the book is the life of the patrolman, which has yet to be adequately covered by any good, recent nonfiction work. When I wrote to The New Yorker in 1999 in response to one of Conlon's magazine pieces, I expressed that Conlon seemed to elevate his street-level drug enforcement exploits at the expense of the dignity of the officers who answer two dozen 911 unpredictable calls a day in the most dangerous parts of the city. These officers see the full range of the urban drama, and their stories are always disjunctive: they solve the problem and leave, be it a false burglar alarm or domestic homicide. The story ends for them as it gets passed off to the next group of specialists. It is one of the most frusturating things a person can do.

Now that the book is out, we see that Conlon has chosen the particular track he has because he never served in a patrol precinct and this is foreign ground to him. Before I say anything else that sounds negative, I have to clearly state that given his chosen career track, Conlon's relation of police life there and in general is largely flawless. While it is not complete, it does not have to be to be excellent nonetheless. My differences with Conlon are largely philosophical and in the end, biased: I believe that urban precinct sector and beat patrol is the most raw and meaningful story of policing from almost any perspective, and I would not trade it for a lifetime of narcotics enforcement.

These are the things that other reviewers are right about: It is certainly the best cop book written yet, but critics are still free to wonder exactly what this means in the larger context of the nonficiton memoir genre. It is indeed a bit long, but if you are patient it will reward you with its broad, historical grounding. Yes, that Colon went to Harvard is certainly the gimmick that enabled him to undertake this project, but this is more of a testament to the problems with The New Yorker than with Conlon. If a cop with a degree from CUNY showed up at the New Yorker's door with the exact same manuscript as Conlon's, they would have had their security escort him out; life in the Conde Nast building is designed to be free of the sight and scent of the common person from the outer boroughs (unless she is your secretary). Conlon used Harvard to get attention, and it worked. If there are better non-Ivy-League police writers out there, he has opened doors for them as a result.

There are moments where his choice of nonfiction memoir limits the book. By luck and fate, Conlon wasn't at Ground Zero on the morning of 9/11, so he is stuck telling an ancilliary story of working to separate out the human remains from the wreckage at a dump in Staten Island. He was never shot at, so he tells a story of bullets whizzing by him on a project rooftop. If this is getting shot at, then every cop who has worked a few years of nights in Brooklyn North has been shot at. The truth of the matter is that most cops in bad areas draw their guns often, fight it out with the bad guys regularly, and see things that for them are commonplace, but that would make a true blue blood wet his pants. But most do not fire their handguns or get shot at in the course of their career. This is because we have an excellent, safe department, but it deflates the story a bit.

In the end, I am probably not such a good reviewer for this book, except by an indirect means. Nothing in it surprised me, because when you do this job long enough, you can see a person impaled on a spiked fence from a three-story fall--writhing and dying as firefighters saw the fence out around him--and you can go home and eat dinner and tell your wife that nothing interesting happened at work that day. So, indirectly, the fact that nothing surprised me means that Conlon writes about the things that cops forget every day.

In remembering these things, Conlon has given readers enamored with urban policing a book that will not be soon forgotten. We are witnessing a transformation of policing from a vocation into a profession, and cops like Conlon are the leaders. He will not be the last well-educated cop to join the Job, and as they do, the life of the police officer will be brought into sharper public focus with, among other things, great books such as these.

If you peruse this book for a few minutes, you will know if it is for you or not. If you get the feeling that it is, then buy it; you know who you are and the cop's life fascinates you. Conlon will certainly not let you down.