My Father's Gun: One Family, Three Badges, One Hundred Years in the NYPD

Armed with an old, slant-keyed Underwood instead of his fathers .38 Special service revolver, McDonald throws the windows open on the insular society of New York City cops. Rendered with a brooding elegance, this memoir of three generations of policemen unfolds against a background of savage urban crime that drives even the most idealistic cops crooked. During his grandfathers rounds at the turn of the century, the department was known as the most corrupt, brutal, incompetent organization in the world. Sixty years later, and a long way from the bawdy corruption of Tammany Hall, McDonalds father struggled at the command of a South Bronx precinct emptied by the white flight of the 1960s. As kosher markets folded up and heroin claimed the streets, wave upon wave of virulent crime taught cops that the difference between good and bad was often a matter of taste. Trying himself to tell good from evil in his familys history, McDonald notes that the job had a way of crushing virtuous traits under the heel of a shined brogan. Dad finally traded his badge for the workaday comfort of an airline security post, while brother Frankies volcanic Irish temper nearly lost him, in a booze-fueled racist outburst, his badge. Observing such human wreckage through the eyes of a journalist, McDonald offers bluntly that the NYPD was a trash compactor that squashed lives and spat its members out broken and defeated. This is an unsparing document of the thin line in law enforcement between heroism and infamy. (May)