This was written when Wambaugh was just breaking on to the scene and was white hot. Decades after reading this book I can still recall some scenes. Interesting, in his newest "Hollywood Crows" the author has a present day cop make a throw away line about the place where 60'-70's LAPD cops used to hang out with beer and badge bunnies. Those days are gone forever but if you want to see an author at the top of his game buy this book.

This book was recommended by a friend and he loved it and so did I. He is well read and remembered lines from this book and he hadn't read it in years. Great quick read if you like the inner workings of a police station.

This book has always been one of my favorites. Back in the '70's, I was a Sky Cop in the Air Force & after seeing the movie version, our squadron purchased Choirboy T-shirts and belt buckles,(which has a .38 bullet hole in it) I still have the buckle and wear it occasionally. Must read for die hard Wambaugh fans and brings back memories of carrying a wheel gun and when policing wasn't just a job!

I read The Choirboys when I was a teenager back in the mid-seventies and found it very enjoyable. After casual discussions with former police officers about their personal experiences while on duty, Mr. Wambaugh's book still holds up after thirty-five years. Highly recommended to anyone that wants to get a feel of what it's like to be in law enforcement and working the streets. The experiences and emotions they go through are not something solely representative of living in Los Angeles.

A wild romp through the lives of some LAPD cops. Great characters. Funny. A bit dated but this adds to the charm. Mabe the best book of it's type ever written.

I first read "The Choirboys" in the late 1970s, and remember it well. Not long ago, I downloaded Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park" onto my iPod, and it brought this story back to my mind. I asked my husband if he had ever read it, and when he said no, I ordered this for him for Father's Day. He found it as entertaining as I did.

Like many of Wambaugh's other books, this isn't for the easily offended. If you are looking for political correctness, you won't find it here!

Okay, he stole the voice and the ideas from Joseph Heller. There's way too much narrative. And there's no plot. SO WHAT. Wambaugh's Choirboys is his finest work, and it's what I love the most, gritty reality. It's a book that needs badly to be read in this era of fantasies, king kongs, hobbits and other escapisms.

"The Choirboys" is not only Joseph Wambaugh's best novel to date; it belongs up on the shelf of modern American classics along with David Mamet, Raymond Chandler, and Joseph Heller. It's just that good and unforgettable. Wambaugh puts everything he knows about being a cop into this novel along with slashing, satirical prose, Vonnegut-like black humor, and a sorrowful humanism to produce a masterpiece.

I mentioned Heller. It's pretty clear that Wambaugh based much of the style and technique of his novel on Catch-22: A Novel (Simon & Schuster Classics) but it's an inspired borrowing. There was a flowering of comic literature about the absurdity and cruelty of the world during the 1960's and '70's and Wambaugh was part of it. You can see it in the fragmented way he tells his tale, how piece by piece he leads us on suspensefully to the heart of the story. It's seems there's been a killing in MacArthur Park, but we don't know the details. We gradually meet the choirboys, those cops on the front lines of the new war in the urban free-fire zone. Wambaugh provides a terrifying story for each one of them, along with generous helpings of "Animal House" type humor, until it becomes impossible to distinguish between laughter and screams.

I wonder if this book, with its scorching language about race and sex, could be published in the same form today. "The Choirboys" is, if anything, a triumph of political incorrectness, a plea that candor about our humanity is a primary virtue. You walk away from "The Choirboys" with that indispensable feeling that comes only from great literature; you feel like you have entered the heart and soul, the world, of other human beings.

and better than most about True Crime, but still a collection of "stories cops tell each other." The plot is structured like a Medieval tragedy of revenge--you know what's going to happen at the beginning & have to wait to the end to see it. It isn't a novel; it's a docudrama, because many stories are drawn from headlines. Some have appeared on TV, in various cop shows. Characters are cops the author has known, but, as usual, Waumbaugh is incapable of portraying women, except as tramps or whores, so females are cardboard cutouts. Waumbaugh writes adventure stories for boys, like Hemmingway & Joseph Conrad, but a good adventure can be a good read; this one is. Interesting for its lore, Waumbaugh's confessional references to the Classics, and the experience of watching him learn his craft. And there's a moral: The true danger of police work is that "those who fight monsters must take care not to become monsters."