Entries Tagged 'Book Reviews' ↓

Since I lived for a year in Baghdad’s Green Zone, I felt it was necessary for me to read what happened before I got there, under L. Paul Bremer, bureaucrat extraordinaire. That is why I recently found myself reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

To say that the Bush Administration and its chosen Iraq occupation overlords made poor choices during and immediately after the invasion of that country would be an understatement so vast that I have no words to describe how big an understatement I would be making. Reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City reinforced for me many of the reasons why I heard the impact of so many mortars during my 2005-2006 sojourn to Iraq’s largest city and at the time one of the most violent if not the most violent city in the world.

I met Rajiv Chandrasekaran in Baghdad in 2006, when I credentialed him for access to military bases. The man was humble, unassuming and patient with the bureaucratic process he endured, which is much more than I can say for Geraldo Rivera, who had sycophants hanging all over him and required that we open for a special session to credential him. In any case, the book itself is superly written in a professional tone.

The damning indictments of cronyism and poor decision making due to a complete lack of understanding of the culture and history of Iraq are presented artfully, without the forced overtones of sarcasm that would have appeared had I written Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

From the story of the Iraqi expatriatate who returns post invasion to open a five-star pizza shop only to find his American customers cannot leave their fortified enclave to the tale of the minor minister who is assasinated for trying to help his country without being politically involved, to the detailed descriptions of the “little America” inside a several square mile compound in downtown Baghdad, this book is well worth reading.

I do not know if L. Paul Bremer has yet publicly admitted how arrogant and stupid many of the decisions made in that first year of occupation were, but he knows it in his heart. If he doesn’t that would mean the man has no heart.

Having served in Iraq, and having been to a few locales outside the “Emerald Palace” I called the Green Zone, I still hold pain in my heart for the people I met and for their suffering. Things may be turning around now in that country. But in reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City, it becomes clear that much of the violence that wracked the country and the city of Baghdad could have been avoided if things had been done differently in the beginning. We’ll never know how many died because of bad decision making, but it is clear that the numbers are in the tens of thousands and possibly much higher.

If you’ve ever wondered what was really going on in those first days of the occupation, you owe it to yourself to read this book. Highly recommended.

Infidel is the autobiography of a Muslim Somali named Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The book tells the story of growing up in Africa and the Middle East. Without giving away all the details, suffice it to say that Infidel is an intelligent damning of the effects of the religion called Islam on the human mind. Ayaan’s tale is one of forced transitions, surprising transitions and needed transitions that have not yet happened.

Ayaan goes from being a somewhat devout Muslim to being a determined apostate living under a death sentence. Infidel is a thought provoking read about the mental cages that human beings trap themselves inside. It is a thought provoking journey between rigid, rabid devotion and reasoned, naive liberalism. It is a tale of the 21st century clash between a static, unchanging world and one that is tolerant and evolving. Highly recommended. Infidel is not a book to read for the lovely prose or the spine tingling drama. It is a book to read because it encapsulates and summarizes how fundamental Islam views women, how it views kafirs (unbelievers) and how it fiercely resists change.

I’ve read Alas, Babylon several times over the years. It is always worth picking up again. Pat Frank writes with a distinct style that accurately captures life in 1950’s Florida.

His work starkly highlights how different our racial attitudes, sexual mores and cultural taboos have become since those days. The writing is entertaining, compelling and full of rich characters.

Perhaps most importantly, Frank was one of the first to chronicle a threat that is still with us, the threat of nuclear conflict. In Alas, Babylon, the threat is between superpowers. The bombs of that era pale in comparison to the bombs that exist today which only serves to make the imagined reality of life after nuclear war more sobering for a reader in the year 2007.

Frank knew what he was writing about because his real name was Harry Hart, and Harry Hart was a journalist, government consultant and ultimately a talented writer. I highly recommend spending an evening or two with survivors of Fort Repose, Florida. Alas, Babylon is one of those rare novels that completely transport me out of the room I’m in and into the author’s imagination.

REVIEWER’S NOTE: This review contains reveals plot twists, although I doubt that will take away any reader’s enjoyment of the novel.

America’s Last Days has a highly interesting premise that I find wholly plausible. In times of increasingly bitter partisanship in Washington, the only thing that keeps us from being embroiled in a second civil war is the fact that we’re soft. If the power ever does go out, all bets are off. That’s what kept me engrossed in this book. It really could happen. All it would take is a dedicated core group of motivated, intelligent insiders.

Author Douglas MacKinnon loses points for uninspiring character development and dialog. His characters feel like they might be based on real people, but they speak in ways I cannot imagine real people speaking.

Lots of people will hate America’s Last Days or love it based on their own political viewpoints. That makes it likely that more than half of this book’s reviews will be highly biased and based not on readability but on personal enjoyment. There is certainly nothing wrong with that.

Readers who classify themselves as progressives or left leaning will probably not feel good about this novel. Readers who classify themselves as classical liberals or right leaning or libertarian will probably enjoy the book immensely.

One of the most contentious events in the novel will be the nuclear detonation near the end. Could such an event happen? Absolutely. In fact, I think such an event is quite likely in the next 50 years. Whether the device will be triggered by homegrown groups is not certain, but there are plenty of separatist movements inside this country, and there always have been homegrown separatists hiding among us. None of them has been as competent as the 1776 Command or the country would already have split asunder.

There are many useful historical tidbits scattered throughout the book that you may not have picked up in school. These relate primarily to the Civil War.

I can heartily recommend America’s Last Days, both as an entertaining read, and a thought provoking statement about one potential future the United States is facing. An apropos novel about uncertain times written in uncertain times.

Island in the Sea of Time is a fascinating what if novel that asks the reader to imagine life for a group of 20th century Americans thrown back in time to long before the birth of Christ, into a world of polytheism, tribalism, bronze weapons, brutal wars and slavery.

One of the main characters is black, female and gay and also a military officer. Other reviewers I’ve perused seem to think Stirling spends too much time obsessing over Marian’s self-dialogue. I disagree. An intelligent gay black female military officer’s self-actualization would probably be pretty close to what Stirling writes on behalf of Alston, in my opinion.

Another character I found fascinating was Dr. Alice Hong, the S&M freak who takes advantage of the fact that she no longer lives in a world with central authority. I know some people like her who, in the absence of Rule of Law, would go hog wild, indulging their dark, animalistic passions at every opportunity. There are lots of humans like Hong floating around with no moral compass to guide them on their journey through life.

The research that went into Island in the Sea of Time appears to be meticulous. Two of the themes running through the tale that kept me reading were the 20^th century American conservative prejudice towards gays and the 20^th century group of “progressive” eco-idiots. Pamela Lisketter and her misguided buffoons’ misadventures and ultimate horrific demise were at once interesting and repulsive. I’ll leave other plot developments unmentioned to surprise you, but rest assured there are plenty of twists and turns that will keep you reading.

Island in the Sea of Time is not a kid’s book, and it isn’t written for the squeamish or homophobic. The tendency to jump from character to character on almost every page frustrated me slightly, but other than that I enjoyed Island in the Sea of Time quite a bit. I’ve read through it twice now.

The companion novel Against the Tide of Years is also an entertaining read.

Interface is techno thriller that manages to bring together diverse characters, locales and an intricate plot into a fairly believable near future scenario in which the soon to be President of the United States is controlled by a computer chip implanted in his brain after a stroke.

It’s full of interesting characters including the first black female President of the United States of America, who begins the story as a nearly homeless bag lady plagued by misfortune. Then there is Floyd Wayne Vishniak, participant in polling research and destined to become a serial killer whom no one believes as he hunts down the conspirators controlling the candidate he has been watching on TV, whom he is certain is being mind controlled. Cy Ogle is the manipulative pollster at the center of the plot to put a puppet into the White House. These are just a few of the lively, interesting characters you’ll encounter.

One of the things that I enjoy most about Stephenson’s writing is his ability to put me inside the head of each character as they progress through their various pieces of the overall plot. Interface is one of many novels by Mr. Stephenson that kept me interested from the moment I picked it up until the moment I’d digested the last word. Could the events described in the book happen? Certainly.

Most of us believe that our government is doing things behind our back all the time. Are there really secret societies trying to pull strings behind the scenes and outside the law. Absolutely. Are they as powerful and effective as the ones described in Interface. Who knows? I’m not a member of a secret society. And if I was I wouldn’t be allowed to talk about it. If I did talk about it, I’d have to kill you afterwards.

The truth is, the government doesn’t even know what the government is doing more than half of the time. In such an environment there are always rogue operators both inside and outside officially approved uses of power. Some of them are caught, and some of them are not. Certain types of human beings will always look out for their own interests above all else and at the expense of others.

Interface is an enjoyable novel about people looking out for their own perceived interests. It’s got medical aspects, psychological aspects, technological aspects and most of all, characters that pull you into the story and keep you interested in what happens next.

I recently reviewed Days of Infamy: A Novel of Alternate History and while I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I complained that author Harry Turtledove perhaps understated the brutality of the Japanese during World War II. End of the Beginning picks up where Days of Infamy left off, and this time, I think the true horror of living in a Japanese occupied territory during World War II is clearly illustrated.

Perhaps it is just me, but I am more horrified by violent rape than I am by death. Death can be horrible, but with death, the horror ends. In End of the Beginning, some of the characters that I had learned to identify with and had grown fond of find themselves in increasingly desperate straights. Hawaii’s civilians are slowly starving. U.S. prisoners of war are on a program of accelerated slow death. Their hunger is punctuated by random beatings and grueling manual labor.

Fletcher "Fletch" Armitage, a U.S. POW, is a walking skeleton and his wife Jane, who had been in the process of divorcing him when the war began, is forced to work in a Japanese "comfort house" as a sex slave. She is beaten and forced to satisfy numerous Japanese daily. The writer does an excellent job of bringing home the shame and horror of being forced to surrender your body repeatedly to other humans who do not perceive you as human but as an object to be used. This is not a book for children. I felt queasy reading certain passages, and I am perhaps one of the most jaded Americans I know.

Despite or perhaps because of the discomfort I felt as the stories of characters I had come to care about unfolded and took turns for the worse, this book had me hypnotized throughout. It was better than Days of Infamy mostly because I was rooting for America to retake Hawaii the whole time. I had to wait to read End of the Beginning for this to happen.

Although the Japanese are portrayed as brutal (and they were, historically speaking), Turtledove also portrays some of his Japanese characters as likeable men dedicated to their duty. Commander Genda, who is the engineer of the invasion and Admiral Yamamoto’s protege, has an affair with the recently crowned Queen of Hawaii but he is a likable, intelligent man who is not brutal by nature and is simply doing his best to serve his nation.

End of the Beginning managed to to suck me through its 440 pages in two days and left me wanting to hear more of the story. My own war here in Iraq seems boring by comparison to the scope and scale of events in World War II, and Turtledove’s imagined land invasion of Hawaii is not that far off what might have happened. A highly worthwhile read for history buffs, action fans, romance lovers and adventure aficionados.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this book. I’m a huge Neal Stephenson fan. His writing is wonderful. His characters are fascinating. This book, co-written with his uncle under the pen name Stephen Bury is, in my opinion, highly underrated.

First and foremost, if you’ve read Stephenson’s recent work (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle then you’ll probably find The Cobweb to be somewhat light reading. On the other hand, if you like thrillers, this is a very easy and palatable read.

What I enjoyed most about The Cobweb were the indictments of Washington bureaucrats, and of the way the U.S. Government works (or doesn’t, as is more likely). The books characters are people are I can relate to, whether we’re talking about simple speaking but intelligent deputy sheriff Clyde Banks or the cynical career CIA agent Hennessy. The family of wrestlers named Dhont and the (fictional) migratory Vakhan Turks added a lot to the tale.

Since I have spent five years on active duty in both the Marine Corps and the Army, I particularly enjoyed the critiques of bloated bureaucracy and the central theme of the book "being cobwebbed" by bureaucrats. The detailed descriptions of government bloat and inefficiency are spot on.

The Cobweb manages to mock politics, politicians, bureaucrats and bureaucray and I found that aspect of the novel highly refreshing. The only scene I found unrealistic or unbelievable in the entire novel was the shootout in downtown D.C. in which one of the characters survives a pistol battle only to ask, "What was that all about?" People who survive gun battles that take place inside a vehicle with the windows rolled up aren’t going to be able to hear, but I can forgive the authors since they’ve probably never heard a gun fired inside a car with the windows rolled up. I’m pretty sure a lot of the botulism stuff was unrealistic too, but I’m not a scientist, and so my suspension of disbelief remained intact in regards to the Iraqi terrorist plot to use botulism against Israel and thereby break the coalition. I suspect that in the real world, though, such a scenario wouldn’t work, because the truth of the matter is that every country but Britain could have pulled out of the first Gulf War and the result would still have been identical. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting plot the kept my rapt attention throughout.
My favorite portion of The Cobweb is a long speech in which the jaded Hennessy explains that government does not solve problems it merely manages them. Bureaucrats don’t actually fix anything, they find ways to drag out and prolong the problems, making them their own and passing them on to the next crop of bureaucrats, who continue the process of managing the problems.

The Cobweb is a wonderful yarn that highlights the best and worst in people and institutions and it’s a wonderful romp through a fictional part of Iowa that I highly recommend. Guest starring two real historical characters - Tariq Aziz and George Herbert Walker Bush.

Days of Infamy was an easy read for me. I finished it in two sittings, which isn’t bad for a tome that runs 440 pages in hardcover. The premise - Japan following up the air attack on Hawaii with a land invasion, is a fascinating one. Turtledove develops a palatable chain of events the could and probably would have happened had such an attack occurred. His characters are compelling, and he tells the story from the viewpoint of both Japanese and American characters, as well as throwing in some others for a nice potpourri. Imagine Hawaii with a king - I won’t say anymore to keep from spoiling the tale.

I think that Mr. Turtledove probably understated the brutality of the Japanese a little bit. If you read this book and don’t already have a firm understanding of what did happen in World War II, then read about the Rape of Nanking. Days of Infamy does address the sheer brutality of Japanese troops during World War II, but barely begins to touch on the scale of the brutality. The main characters in the book are spared watching their wives and children raped and murdered in orgies of what I would call unrestrained evil. Massacres with knives, swords and bayonets are absent in this imagined invasion of Hawaii, although the Japanese are cruel and harsh as conquerers.

Perhaps the lack of massacres is a realistic one. The Japanese left foreigners in China mostly unmolested as they pillaged the land they conquered. Centuries of animosity between Japan and China might have been one of the reasons for the wholescale slaughters of Chinese. Having read other Harry Turtledove alternate history novels, I know that he does meticulous research and believe he has written a fairly realistic what-if book in this case as well.

What’s great about this "novel" is that it kept me spellbound throughout the invasion and up until the climactic naval air battle in the last chapter. What’s not great about this tome is that nowhere on the jacket are readers told that that book is the first in a series. It sucked me in without being honest and that irritates me. The book ends without wrapping up the surviving characters stories.

Two of the main characters, artillery officer Fletcher Armitage and his ex-wife Jane are in limbo as the book ends. Fletcher is slowly dying of starvation in a POW camp as Jane grows her own vegetables and worries about being raped by occupying Japanese troops. And another character, introduced halfway through the book, Joe Crosetti, is still flying trainer planes stateside on his journey to become a naval aviator. There are plenty of other characters whose stories are left unfinished as the book ends.

Clearly, the book is part of a series. I liked the first installment enough to buy the second to find out what happens to the remaining characters. I don’t appreciate not being told I’d have to invest another $50 to do so. If a book is part of a series, then the cover should tell you so.

Days of Infamy is an excellent read. It’s well researched and the descriptions of men and machines are detailed and highly interesting. The characters feel real to me, and I wrote a four year weekly column about World War II while on active duty in the Marine Corps, so I probably have a better education about World War II than most who might be interested in this book and the ones that follow. Highly recommended for those who enjoy reading for the pure pleasure of reading, and for those who don’t mind getting a little history lesson out of their novels.

I read this entire novel while traveling from Baghdad, Iraq to Atlanta, Georgia on my two weeks rest and relaxation so kindly afforded to me by the government as a reward for serving in a combat zone.

Kiln People is a fun read, with plenty of plot twists around the central idea that society has discovered a way to make a cheap replaceable you. People can have cheap copies of themselves made for various purposes. These copies only last one day, but multiple copies can be made per day if you have the resources.

The central character in Kiln People is detective Albert Morris, who has been hired by multiple groups with multiple agendas to solve the same central mystery. The mystery revolves around changes to the people copying industry. Without giving away anymore of the plot, if you can imagine a world where someone has reduced the soul to a science, and figured out how to copy it into a clay vessel, then you will probably enjoy some of the resulting imagined social changes as described by author Brin.

Some of the scenarios envisioned are very interesting. Casual sex without any consequences that we face today, such as disease. Dying over and over again being of no consequence because the original you survives. Most interesting is the plethora of changes to social mores as most people spend most of their time in throwaway bodies and the new social groups that result in support and opposition of cloning and cheap throwaway selves.

The book got almost unbearable towards the end as the central character is changed. Without throwing in massive spoilers, suffice it to say that I thought Mr. Brin spent way too much time trying to explain quantum mechanics and the Soul Standing Wave ruined my suspension of disbelief somewhat. Overall though, I enjoyed Kiln People’s action, mystery and massively complex plot sequences that all inexorably drew together into a grand finale that was odd but enjoyable. I’d pick up another Brin novel in a heartbeat.