Word: wambaugh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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LINES AND SHADOWS by Joseph Wambaugh Morrow, 383 pages...
...policemen walk on fault lines In six novels and one nonfiction work, Joseph Wambaugh has followed their uncertain footsteps, recording the gallows humor and suicidal despair of California's blue knights. But readers have generally been able to take comfort in the notion that the men were, after all, fictive; surely real life was less melodramatic. In this tragic documentary, no such consolations are possible...
...Wambaugh recalls, the San Diego police department formed what came to be known as the Border Alien Robbery Force in 1976 to aid the thousands of illegal Mexican aliens who came north from Tijuana. The original ten officers, eight of them Mexican Americans, did not arrest the aliens: the "wetbacks" were useful as cheap labor. Instead, they cracked down on the knife-wielding thieves and rapists who preyed on the meek pollos in the barren DMZ between countries...
...experiment" ended in 1978, and the aftershocks were predictable: divorce, alcoholism, psychoses and stalled careers. Wambaugh ticks off a litany of blame: capricious immigration laws, social hypocrisy, improperly trained lawmen. But his greatest enmity is reserved for the television correspondents who overpublicized and melodramatized ten young men and their "monstrous international dilemma...
...foreign book publisher. "The trouble is, you can never tell which book will become a bestseller in Japan. A popular novel in America does not necessarily sell well here. I always trust my sixth sense." Among Hayakawa's trusted novelists: John Gardner, Dick Francis, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Wambaugh...