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

Amazon.com
The day-to-day reality of life as a police officer comes through with unglamorous clarity in this scrupulously honest memoir. Yes, the author recounts some exciting stories of cases cracked and perpetrators nailed. But in recounting three relatives' careers in the New York City Police Department, Brian McDonald spends considerable time delineating personal relationships (particularly with their strong-minded wives) and their progress (or lack of it) within a bureaucracy as hidebound as any other branch of the civil service. McDonald's grandfather refused to participate in Tammany Hall corruption, and as punishment was constantly reassigned for the next 14 years; his father burned out as commander of the toughest precinct in the South Bronx. And his brother's troubled trajectory reflected the turbulent atmosphere of the post-Knapp Commission department, held in low repute by law-abiding citizens as it grappled with an increasingly brazen criminal population. The author is candid about his ambivalent feelings toward his tight-lipped father and the ethos that sees a world "made up of only two camps--cops and bad guys," but grateful for Dad's gift of an Underwood typewriter, which led him to journalism. McDonald's gift in return is a book that portrays policemen neither as heroes nor villains, but as recognizable human beings. --Wendy Smith


The New York Times Book Review, George James
...McDonald gives us an insight into the lives of policemen--not only as they battle crime on the streets but also as they tend to the quiet wars at home.


From Booklist
McDonald brings many sources besides received lore to bear in this affecting account of his Irish American family's involvement with the New York City police. Dating back to the 1890s, the Skelly/McDonald clan's war stories echo both the history of the force, from infamous crimes to investigations into police corruption, and the social history of the metropolis it served. That larger perspective elevates this memoir above average cop-talk stories, as the large urban forces--Tammany Hall in the 1910s, heroin in the '50s, white flight and black militancy in the '60s, crack in the '80s--impinge on the author's police relatives just as influentially as any dangerous chase and collar. His grandfather, father, and older brother are the memoir's central figures. Although the career of each is recounted separately, McDonald artfully conveys the connectedness through the generations created by the ambition of becoming an officer and then the striving up the departmental ladder, underlain by the perils inherent in the police occupation. A quality mixture of cop drama, social context, and personality portraiture. Gilbert Taylor


From Kirkus Reviews
McDonald tries to unravel the blue-walled enigma of the NYPD through the lens of a sprawling Irish Catholic family memoir. McDonalds father, a detective lieutenant, was among the first of many cops to violate regulations and move his family from the city to then-rural Rockland County, a calculated retreat from the tide of drugs and gangs that he saw coming even in 1955. McDonald explores the dichotomy between this artificially tranquil police domesticity and an urban sphere in which the cops were losing; this schism imploded by the early 1970s, during McDonalds adolescence, a time of anticop fervor, high crime, and his own holding onto the longhaired remnants of the 1960s. Also told are the parallel histories of his grandfathers pre-1920 experiences within the corrupt Tammany NYPD (a muscular yet meticulous evocation of old New York that recalls Luc Santes Low Life), and of his brother, who became a detective after high-risk Street Crimes duty, was demoted after two ambiguous incidents that nearly drove him from the force, then ultimately regained his gold shield and became a teacher of police science. Throughout, McDonald eloquently addresses the fascination those close to cops find in their volatile circumstances, while maintaining a jaundiced view of how the department treats its own. He examines his own youthful confusion, wistfully taking the NYPD exam during a hiring freeze and carousing, gambling, and loafing in suburban discos or gangster school. But he is more circumspect where his brother and father are concerned. Although his portrait of the guarded inner lives of law enforcers in the midst of savage criminality is arguably as good as it could be, these men remain somewhat distant and at times opaque, and their experiences feel less than archetypal. Still, McDonalds first book offers an original take upon this storied (and notorious) institution and on the conflicted inner lives of one cop family, written with grace, seriousness, and historical understanding. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
In this powerful memoir about three generations of New York City policemen, Brian McDonald chronicles a hundred years of dedication, disillusion, heroism, and tragedy behind the blue wall of silence that separates a cop from the rest of the world. His grandfather, Thomas Skelly, entered the department in 1893, when the NYPD was little more than a brutal gang of organized enforcers and Tammany Hall a corrupt political machine that could make or break an honest cop's career. His father Frank's career would span World War II through the 1960s, taking him from street cop to squad commander of the Forty-first Precinct. Better known as "Fort Apache," it was a place from which few cops emerged whole. His brother Frank McDonald, Jr., went on to become a decorated officer, waging an undercover war on drugs and crime. From turn-of-the-century Brooklyn to the South Bronx in the 1970s to the bedroom communities of upstate New York, My Father's Gun combines a rare and intimate family story with turbulent social history.

"A dramatic memoir of three generations of Irish American police officers . . . Haunting." --The New York Times Book Review

"A rich and riveting narrative . . . Nuanced, colorful, frank, free of all the usual cop clichs." --Newsday


About the Author
Brian McDonald was born in the Bronx and grew up in Rockland County, New York. He is a graduate of Fordham University and the Columbia School of Journalism, and contributes frequently to New York City newspapers, including The New York Times. My Father's Gun is his first book.


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My Father's Gun is a wonderful, wonderful book. It is a unique look at an Irish family's hundred years with the police department. It is unflinching, joyous, sad, angry-and full of love. -- (Peter Maas, author of Underboss and Serpico) — Peter Mass


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