COPS & BARTENDERS.

My Father's Gun
One Family, Three Badges, One Hundred Years in the NYPD
Brian McDonald
Dutton, $24.95, 309 pp.

As a saloonkeeper in the Bronx in the 1940s, my grandfather was always wary when a cop walked into his bar. For him, policemen weren't good customers. They tended to make a lot of noise, drink too much, and act insulted when their bar tab actually reflected how much they had consumed. For my grandfather, cops-much like baseball players and army veterans-acted as if their uniform gave them a license to behave boorishly.

I was reminded of my grandfather while reading Brian McDonald's My Father's Gun. McDonald comes from a long line of cops (his maternal grandfather, father, and brother all served in the New York Police Department) and his book recounts their years at home and on the job. In particular, the author focuses on how his blue brethren-none of them particularly heroic or corrupt-were able to hold down such an exacting job and raise a family at the same time. In this regard, McDonald sets out to help all of those who (like my grandfather) may have some distaste for cops understand the stories behind police dramas and the 11 p.m. news.

In this project, McDonald is largely successful. He gives a compelling behind-the-scenes look at the life of a New York City cop. In fact, the greatest asset of McDonald's book is that he chooses to pay attention to the neighborhoods and families behind the men in blue. (A simple approach, yes, but not one which has been done much before-by writers or television producers.) For instance, in one passage, the author describes his mother's life as the matriarch of a cop family: "Sometimes, as she listened to her son's cop's talk, she would put down her crossword and close her eyes like someone listening to a sad aria. I realize now that that song had played for the whole of my mother's life, and, for her, it was both painful and impossible not to listen to."

McDonald also gives us a rare portrait of the cop hamlet known as Pearl River, New York. (The author's father was one of the first twelve New York City cops-dubbed later the "Apostles"-to break department rules forbidding cops to live outside the city and to move his family into this suburb across the Hudson River.) As McDonald ably shows, this town-packed with over-worked men trying to leave the violence of the city behind-is a sociology dissertation waiting to be written.

My Father's Gun also works because it is more than a memoir. In addition to plumbing the depths of three generations of family drama, McDonald gives us a sharp history of the NYPD. The McDonald family saga begins with Thomas Skelly, McDonald's maternal grandfather. The son of Irish immigrants, Skelly entered the police department when Tammany Hall ruled New York politics. McDonald nimbly maneuvers his narrative from a history of his grandfather to a history of the department and some of its most colorful characters. We meet William Devery, "the obese and corrupt chief of police who once owned the New York Highlanders, a baseball team later sold to Colonel Jacob Ruppert and renamed the New York Yankees." McDonald's narrative is equally engaging when we meet the author's father, Frank McDonald-the son of an immigrant coal miner who used the civil service exam to climb the NYPD's professional ladder.

The chapters on the author's brother (Frank, Jr.), however, aren't as strong. While Frank, Jr.'s difficulties dealing with a city consumed by racial tensions and a drug epidemic give us an important glimpse into the problems that tore at the heart of the metropolis in the 1970s and 1980s, the narrative loses its momentum here. These pages often read like a string of stories from the precinct pub, connected by a few significant events (promotions, marriage, birth of a child, etc.). His brother's tale, while fascinating at times, does not merit the space (it numbers twice as many pages as any other section) McDonald devotes to it.

The most poignant moments in this book remain those in which the author reveals his own story. McDonald once considered becoming a cop, but decided instead, after working odd acting and bartending jobs, to become a writer. In fact, the struggle between McDonald's identity as the grandson/son/brother of a cop and his identity as a writer is ever- present-even when McDonald himself does not make an appearance on the page. For the author's own literary style-his use of metaphor, simile, and anecdote-reveals that struggle. At times, McDonald's writing seems clearly the property of the NYPD and all of its trite bar-room banter: "At home he was a father who put his whole heart into trying to build a home for his family. In the city, that heart was often covered with a bulletproof vest." At other times, his writing has a touch of poetry: "The night hummed with a high-pitched crackle, like a radio station not quite tuned in." It seems that the author is, at points, too close to the NYPD to write about it with the clarity and nuance of which he is clearly capable.

Maurice Timothy Reidy is an editorial assistant at Commonweal.