The Lost Son

From the Publisher: NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik's memoir The Lost Son had only just been completed when the horror of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers rocked New York and the nation on September 11th. This extraordinary memoir-by a man "universally recognized as one of the heroes of this story," in the words of ABC's Peter Jennings-has now been updated to include a 60-page afterword and 16 pages of never-seen photographs covering the attack and its aftermath, and books will ship as planned, to be on sale November 13th. Readers will see and hear first-hand the tremendous heroism and sorrow of America's greatest tragedy through the eyes of a leader at "ground zero." From the sagging row houses of Paterson, New Jersey to the cocaine fields of Columbia, from the razor wire of Rikers Island to the streets of New York City, Bernard Kerik has dedicated his life to a single goal: to fight the injustice he sees around him.^ A jail warden with a black belt and a background in international security and anti-terrorism, Kerik took a substantial pay cut to become a beat cop on the streets of Times Square in 1986. A fearless narcotics detective, he went undercover to buy drugs in Harlem, seized millions of dollars of cocaine from the druglords of the Cali cartel, and was awarded the Police Department's Medal of Valor for saving the life of a fellow officer. In the 1990s, as the city's Commissioner of Correction, he ended the hellish violence at Rikers Island and transformed it into a model of its kind. Today, as Kerik directs the largest municipal police force in the world, his battles continue. And yet Bernard Kerik's greatest battle was not pitched on tough city streets, but within himself. For even as he was driven to seek justice in every corner of the world, this extraordinary man never looked back until he reached the top.^ And when he did, he faced the greatest unsolved case of his life-the tragic mystery of his own mother, who abandoned her young son forty-one years ago.