NYT: Bill Bratton Doesn’t Root for the Bad Guys

A fan of crime novels, the former police commissioner and the author, with Peter Knobler, of a new memoir, “The Profession,” loves Michael Connelly’s hero Harry Bosch — but adds, “I don’t have a favorite villain.”

What books are on your night stand? At any given time I’m reading three or four books: one on my night stand, one in the living room and one on my Kindle for travel. Usually a history, a mystery, a biography, a book on leadership and one on current political issues. I also have books I want to read stacked in my den.

My interests gravitate toward in-depth stories about World War I, World War II and the Civil War, and it should come as no surprise that as a lifelong member of the policing profession I am interested not only in the military but in leadership tactics and strategies.

Right now I have Walter Isaacson’s “The Code Breaker”; Ian Toll’s “Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific 1944-1945”; “Hitler: Downfall 1939-1945,” the last volume of a biography by Volker Ullrich; Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land”; Erik Larson’s “The Splendid and the Vile”; Michael Connelly’s “The Law of Innocence”; Jon Meacham’s “His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope”; Elijah Cummings’s “We’re Better Than This”; Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste”; and Brené Brown’s “Dare to Lead.” I read everything I can find by and about Winston Churchill, going back to “The Gathering Storm,” published in 1948, the first of his six-volume history of the run-up to World War II. Any book about Churchill will wind up next to my bed.

What’s the last great book you read?

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