I’ve gotten to the point where both knees have my activity so restricted that I’ve been forced to fall back on even more reading. (Need to get back to Colorado and my primary insurance coverage for the necessary surgeries but till then…)
Anyway, I dove into my Nook archives and started re-reading the long series of books by Robert Tanenbaum, about the primary protagonist Butch Karp. I read them a few years ago and am having a different reaction this time around.
Tanenbaum is a fascinating guy. He was DA in New York, on a Congressional committee to study the Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination, and has written many books about a NYC DA that have allowed him to explore his philosophies on law, religion, society, etc. He is hard to pin down, politically, as his sentiments appear to be very close to what I consider conservativism yet his characters do drop in passing comments about needing to avoid Republicans in politics.
As I am re-reading the books I keep thinking of the regulars here, and how each of you might enjoy the philosophical discussions that take place among the various characters. Butch Karp is a secular NY Jew with a passion for and dedication to THE LAW—-and he kind of thinks of it like that. and is dedicated to trying to apply the law to the reality of crime and societal problems. He is married to a Sicilian semi-lapsed Catholic with a very different attitude toward the law who actually becomes something of a vigilante in defense of abused women, and their daughter is very religious in something of a pre-Vatican II intellectual-Catholic kind of way. So there are some very intense discussions of spirituality, religion, law as it is, law as it should be, the inner workings of the legal system in NYC, and various internal musings about these and other thoughts. I get the impression that a lot of what Tanenbaum puts in his books are true, like “mole people” living in deep tunnels under NYC, and there is a lot of insight into the defects and problems of law enforcement in NYC.
He’s a very complex guy and I have a new appreciation for the scope of his intellect. Just passing this on, in case anyone is interested in multi-layered novels with crime-solving plots mingled with tutorials on law enforcement and philosophical discourse and musings on everything from The Catholic Church—Then and Now to the practical application of justice to a wildly uncontrolled and uncontrollable population. And BTW he is a brilliant wordsmith, funny and clever, which of course I love.
Blogs For Victory 