Joseph Wambaugh’s latest paints Los Angeles in many clashing colors

A review of Harbor Nocturne, by Joseph Wambaugh

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

When you read Joseph Wambaugh on the endlessly diverse “coppers” of the LAPD or the equally colorful denizens of their turf, you know you’ve met the truth. Listen as he describes three of Hollywood’s zoned-out derelicts:

“Their shirts and trousers were so stained and filthy they’d lost their color and seemed to sprout from them like fungus. Two had splotchy skin with open sores, and there were not twenty teeth among them. As younger transients, they’d covered more territory than Lewis and Clark, but as they got older they’d begun to vaporize into spectres that nobody really saw until they spoke. The unholy ghosts of Hollywood Boulevard.”

No, the world of Joseph Wambaugh and his creations who people the Hollywood police station isn’t pretty. It’s wild, gritty, funny, outrageous, and above all endlessly surprising. Wambaugh has walked these streets. He knows whereof he writes.

The harbor of the title is the shore of San Pedro, a portion of the Port of Los Angeles. Two of the town’s younger residents, Dino Babich, a longshoreman, and his childhood buddy Hector Cozzo, reflect the variously Croatian and Italian history of the place, and their renewed relationship becomes a central factor in the plot.

The story Wambaugh tells revolves around human trafficking and prostitution — and the unsavory people who profit from it. The plot works well and offers up tension and surprises to the end. However, Harbor Nocturne is much less a novel of suspense than it is a character study of the Los Angeles Police Department, as embodied in the coppers of Hollywood Station. If there is an overarching theme to this novel, it’s the extraordinary diversity of Los Angeles today, where 200 languages are spoken. The book features characters of Mexican, Serbian, Italian, Croatian, Korean, Russian, Japanese, African, and Jewish as well as plain old white-bread European descent.

Harbor Nocturne is the fifth and most recent novel in Wambaugh’s Hollywood Station cycle, which began in 2006. Like its predecessors, Harbor Nocturne takes us inside the station and inside the heads of the cops who staff its evening and early-morning “midwatch.” Familiar characters from the earlier novels feature prominently here: the sun-bleached surfer cops “Flotsam and Jetsam”; aspiring actor “Hollywood Nate” Weiss; and young Britney Small, who earned the respect of the “OGs” — the Old Guys of the station — by shooting a violent offender to death. and wishing she’d gained it some other way.

Wambaugh, now 75, is the author of 20 previous books, 14 of them novels. From his very first novel, The New Centurions, in 1971, Wambaugh has been winning acclaim and selling books about the police in very large quantities. The man knows how to write!

“Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide”

A review of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

“. . . more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely  because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine ‘gendercide’ in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.”

These shocking facts are the basis on which Kristof and WuDunn build their case for a new global movement to gain equality for women. Half the Sky is not journalism in the mode of The New York Times, which once employed both the authors and still  runs Kristof’s twice-weekly column, but a self-professed and passionate work of advocacy.

Kristof and WuDunn expose the terrifying reality of the sex slave trade, maternal mortality, and female genital cutting, and the tragedy of education denied to girls, not in the abstract but through the eyes of women and girls they have interviewed and in many cases come to know intimately through extensive travels to some of the most godforsaken places on earth. They have long since learned the lesson that stories of individual human beings are far more effective in conveying harsh realities than any table of statistics. The result is a powerful book crammed with unforgettable characters.

But Half the Sky is a hopeful book. The most compelling tales told in its pages are those of the heroic women and girls who have refused to tolerate their lot: the illiterate rural woman who now teaches surgery to credentialed graduate surgeons in Ethiopia, the Illinois woman who moved to Senegal and found an effective way to dramatically reduce female genital cutting, the upper-caste Indian woman who is saving hundreds of girls from sex slavery. These are today’s heroes, the avatars of a new worldwide movement — not a women’s movement, the authors insist, but a universal movement to claim for all of humanity the rights to life and liberty that so many of us take for granted.

“Decades from now,” write Kristof and WuDunn, “people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that . . . is bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteeth. . . They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.”

For the reader who is sufficiently motivated to take action, Half the Sky includes an extensive list of organizations that are actively engaged in addressing these compelling issues. And it’s tough to read this book from beginning to end without feeling that need.

ISBN-10: 0307267148

ISBN-13: 978-0307267146

ASIN: B002MHOCTO