The Cop Shop: True Crime on the Streets of Chicago

Blau was a movie reviewer before he became a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune in 1989. Settling into his new job, he learned, story-by-story, how to cover crime in Chicago. In this often insightful memoir, he recalls the rise and fall of the notorious El Rukn gang, the promise and eventual compromise of a new police chief, and the ravages of drug abuse and crime on the city's neighborhoods and its people, in particular its children. Blau, now an investigative reporter at the paper, came to respect ``the guts and heroism'' of Chicago's police while at the same time finding them ``so dissatisfied and angry, you could feel it in the air around them. Uncorked, they were among the most dangerous people on earth.'' (May)