The Soul of a Cop

Offers an inside account of life as a cop, describing what it is like to be a rookie on a graveyard shift, to rescue would be "jumpers," to defuse dynamite, and other hazards of police work

By 1987, when Ragonese retired from the NYPD after 17 years of service, he'd won over 100 awards, making him the city's most- decorated cop. He won't win another for writing--even with the help of old-hand Stainback (Snake, 1986, etc.)--but his no-frills memoir does deliver plenty of action and a few sharp opinions. What Ragonese doesn't deliver on is the promise of the title. The soul of this cop is plumbed only uniform-deep (a typical reflective passage: ``Like most cops, I've gotten a bang out of arresting bad guys, but it would be nothing like I knew I'd feel rescuing good guys''). What we get instead is a fast-moving stream of the author's exploits, beginning with his most celebrated, keeping alive a woman trapped beneath a toppled construction crane in 1985. A flashback to his working-class Brooklyn boyhood follows, then a tracing of a glittering career in three divisions of the NYPD: an anticrime unit, where Ragonese caught bank robbers, shot a felon, and bucked for a detective's gold shield; EMS, where he grappled with ``jumpers,'' shot a crippled horse, helped a man crushed by a subway train to die with dignity, and finally got his gold shield; and the bomb squad, where he made two discoveries ``I've never been able to reveal publicly until now''--that, at Staten Island's infamous Willowbrook mental institution, he found (and was forced to cover up) a ``chamber of horrors'' strewn with body parts, and that he witnessed the NYPD using its Bronx firing range as a toxic-waste dump. The criticism of the NYPD implicit in both revelations is shadowed throughout, from bald accusations (``The NYPD has always denied that cops have to meet a quota of traffic summonses. That's a lie'') to gripes about office politics and potshots at fellow (pseudonymous) officers, adding spice to an otherwise straightforward chronicle. Meat and potatoes for hard-core cop fans. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The story of Ragonese's 17 years with the New York Police Department reads like parts of Harvey Rachlin's The Making of a Cop ( LJ 2/1/91), Anthony Schiano's Solo: Self-Portrait of an Undercover Cop ( LJ 1/15/74), and Mark Baker's classic Cops: Their Lives in Their Own Words ( LJ 8/85). His is an exuberant tale of police training, camaraderie, and life on the job--from foot patrol to bomb squad to anti-terrorism to elite anti-crime. It was while working Emergency Services in 1985 that Ragonese added to New York City folklore by attending to a woman pinned dangerously under a crane. The medal he got for that episode was just one of many; promotion, however, was harder to come by. Ragonese speaks openly about this and other dissatisfactions, adding depth to his "as told to" account. For popular criminal justice collections.
-Janice Dunham, John Jay Coll. Lib., New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.