Category: Review

Review: Seizing Power

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Seizing Power

Naunihal Singh’s Seizing Power is a book about military coups and how they work. The timing of this review is a complete coincidence and has no bearing on recent events whatsoever. Anyway, Singh studies the basic three types of coups and makes an academic argument that they are in essence, “coordination games”-that is to say they have to give the appearance of inevitability instead of actual hard power (in most cases.)

Singh divides coups into three categories. The first is coups from the top, like say, the central party committee imprisoning the president and attempting to seize control. The second is coups from the middle, like say, a division-sized force dashing from its base on the border to the capital and hoping the rest of the army can join it. The third is coups from the bottom, like say, rioters in support of a parliament with no army on its own trying to sway the military and take vital television stations. (Yes, all three examples happened in Russia/The USSR. They were the 1991 August Coup, the recent Wagner uprising, and the 1993 constitutional crisis).

Singh spends most of his time covering all three types of coups that happened in Ghana in its history, and then ends with the August Coup of 1991, a coup from the top that should have effortlessly succeeded but in fact failed miserably. Like most academic histories, it gets a little too pendantic at times. But it’s still a great read.

A Thousand Words: Dave’s Redistricting

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Dave’s Redistricting

One of my internet hobbies has been using the Dave’s Redistricting site. It allows you to draw up hypothetical legislative districts and see their demographics. I’m currently using it to make hypothetical seats for a vastly expanded US House of Representatives. It’s both fun and illuminating to see how you have to balance various challenges.

It’s very illustrative of showing how it’s actually harder to make “fair” districts than you might think. You can get a nice sensitive block of counties-that are safe seats. Or you can take half of those counties, balance it with half of a large city, and then you can make an evenly bipartisan district-but how “representative” really is an obvious artificial creation like that?

If you like politics in any form, you have to check this out. It’s simple, easy, and is great for both counterfactuals and actual debate.

Review: The Bucharest Dossier

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The Bucharest Dossier

I knew I had to read a spy thriller when I saw the setting was Romania. So I eagerly snapped up William Maz’s The Bucharest Dossier. That the author actually grew up in said country during the bad old days made me want it even more. Sadly, what goes up must come down. Taking place in the obvious year of 1989, it uses this excellent setting and…. squanders it.

A clumsy moral equivalence between Ceausescu’s Romania and Reagan’s America and making many of the events of the 1989 revolution the actions of foreign intelligence makes this sour. The author to be fair labels it a work of fiction in the afterword, but I can still see how it leaves a bad taste. There’s also the characterization and love story not really doing it for me.

That leaves the main plot. Now I’ll admit I’m not the biggest fan of Le Carre-style grounded spy novels. So I may be biased in this regard. But it still amounted to little more than a 51% story that was dragged down by its other weaknesses. The book does portray its setting mostly well, which makes me think that Maz would have been better off writing a plain historical novel.

Oh well. This could have been a lot better than it was.

Review: Cody’s Return

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Cody’s Return

Stephen Mertz was the main man behind the “Jim Case” pen name adorning the front of the Cody’s Army books in the 1980s. Since he didn’t have the exact rights to the men’s adventure stories featuring John Cody, he made a new character named (brace yourself) – Jack Cody! Who also had thrilling action adventures! What a coincidence! The late Chet Cunningham did something similar with “SEAL Team Twenty”, and it predates self-publishing by quite a bit when authors worked for multiple firms. (In fact, there were times when the throwaway series couldn’t even keep the main character’s name consistent!)

Cody’s Return, in spite of what the name implies, is not the first book in the series. It is, however, the first book in a self-declared trilogy that centers around a crazed arms dealer and his even more crazed girlfriend/cult leader.

The thing about the original Cody’s Army was that, with some exceptions, it was very much a middle of the road series that had all the weaknesses of its format. Which is to say that something like a classic men’s adventure novel is extremely shallow even by cheap thriller standards. And this is the case here as well. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it does make it hard to pick one over another.

What makes this worse is that the book is aiming for a huge plot that it’s trying to stuff into too few pages. I get it’s the intended beginning of a trilogy where the author has complete control, but even in that circumstance it still feels too poorly done. Which is a shame. The plot of nukes, crazies, and colorful characters is something that almost needed a meatier book to do right.

Mertz is a champion of the genre, but he’s done better.

Review: The ISIS Solution

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Released at the height of the 2010s anti-ISIS campaign, The ISIS Solution is a short book by several SOFRep authors, which include such familiar names as Jack Murphy and Peter Nealen. It offers critique and recommendations, and since I knew their books well, I wondered how their nonfiction commentary would go. As commentators, they’re pretty good novelists.

As the saga of “Mean” Joe Greene’s transformation from the best defensive lineman to the worst football commentator ever attests, being good in one field doesn’t translate to being successful in another. Granted, some of this is due to the book being short and aimed at a much broader audience than actual security analysts. But more of it is due to a phenomenon I’ve seen sadly too often.

I call this Fire Joe Morgan-ism (not surprisingly, Morgan was another athlete who went from brilliant player to dubious commentator). There a group of spicy screenwriters (seriously) who dabbled in baseball analytics took pride in dogpiling on all the old crusty baseball hacks who didn’t know any stat beyond batting average. It basically amounts to going ahead of the absolute worst baseline (sportswriters in that case, network talking heads in this one) by showing that you do have genuine knowledge of it (military operations/baseball stats), and then doing a little dance and a victory lap because you’ve overcome such an easy target.

Granted, this probably wasn’t as surprising as I’d thought. Murphy’s books ranged from “blatantly political even when good” to “unironic Metal Gear Solid plotline”, while Nealen’s commentary attempts in Maelstrom Rising sank it a lot compared to the far more apolitical Blackhearts series. But it’s still disappointing, and there are a lot better sources out there.

A Thousand Words: Battle Circuit

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Battle Circuit

One of the last arcade beat em ups that Capcom released in the wake of Final Fight, 1997’s Battle Circuit was obscure for many years until its availability in the Capcom Arcade Stadium collection. This is a shame, because of all the successors to that masterpiece, Battle Circuit is the best I’ve played.

The plot is simple: In a sci fi future, control one of five bounty hunters as they pursue a bunch of colorful villains. The quirkiness and silliness of the genre shows in both the heroes and villains. You can choose between Cyber Blue, a pretty normal anime hero, Captain Silver, a Plastic Man/Mr. Fantastic style stretch-armer, and three goofballs: Catgirl Yellow Iris, walking Venus Flytrap Alien Green, and the weirdest yet: Pink Ostrich, the titular bird with a girl riding on its back (it’s unclear who’s the brains). Similarly, the bosses are just as ridiculous. They start with a disco Elvis impersonator and go through such things as a woman and her giant mandril, an all-female biker gang, and a robot samurai riding some giant beast. The final boss can only be described as looking like an evil Santa Claus.

But what makes the game amazing beyond these characters and their beautiful sprites/animations is how it’s both easy and deep. Sure, it can be played like Final Fight. You can jump around, throw, and do sweep attacks that cost you health. But each character has a lot of moves, and they can be upgraded between levels if you’ve earned enough coins-which you get by landing lots of hits on enemies. Mastering each of these moves makes things a lot more fun. Especially as the characters have their styles, with Alien Green being the slow grappler a la Haggar and Yellow Iris being the rapid “Guy”. All can jump and power up with a special gauge, the effects of which range from gaining more power to recovering health to becoming very durable for a brief time.

There are a few snags. The first is that the characters are not exactly balanced compared to each other. Cyber Blue is the cheap easy mode character. Not only is he intuitive and strong, but his upgraded sweep attack damages everything on the screen. Bosses can be cheesed by just powering up (which increases his strength) and then spamming that move. Meanwhile, Pink Ostrich is very weak normally, only has a flight power of dubious use, and is hard to control. The others fall between those extremes. The worse one, I’d say, is that the segments between the bosses are kind of minimal and forgettable. There’s only a few enemy types and no real engaging set pieces. It’s not really bad, but it doesn’t have the spark the rest of the game does.

Also the third boss is a blander giant robot with very wonky hit detection that’s just frustrating and not fun. But hey, five out of six aren’t bad.

If you like any kind of beat em up, you deserve to check out Battle Circuit. It’s an amazing underappreciated game.

Review: A Killing Truth

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A Killing Truth

Author DV Berkom, a self-proclaimed lover of thriller novels, begins her Leine Basso series with A Killing Truth. Short and sweet, the love of its author for the genre shows obviously. The negative side of this love is that this tale of a female assassin doesn’t exactly break much new ground or push any authorial limits. It’s firmly in the 51% middle of books of this nature.

But it’s also positively in the 51% middle. If you want a good cheap thriller, this is the book for you. Everything about this that needs to work does, and I had a great time reading. I look forward to reading more of Berkom’s work, as it’s clear that she knows what makes a thriller good.

And that’s two positives of loving the genre to one negative. I’ll take that.

Review: US Army Doctrine

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US Army Doctrine: From The American Revolution to the War on Terror

In his study of published doctrine, Walter Kretchik embarks on the herculean task of reading multiple centuries worth of field-manualese. He looks at the very first to the then latest manuals (the book was published in 2011) and how they were applied in practice. The result is an excellent nonfiction study for field manual nerds like me.

The book is very readable and understandable. I would advise reading the actual manuals themselves if you wanted to know more (they’re all public domain by their very nature and the age of many of them), but as a starting point for both doctrine and warfare, this book is excellent. It’s expensive and niche, but it’s good in addition to being those two.

Review: The Angola Deception

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The Angola Deception

Because I’m crazy, I decided to check out a book by an author whose past series I was less than fond of. So I read DC Alden’s The Angola Deception, a cheap thriller about a super-conspiracy that wants to kill the bulk of the world’s population through an engineered germ. I believe there are at least four Jon Land books I’ve read with this exact plot. Blaine McCracken probably stops one bio-conspiracy shadow government in the morning and one in the afternoon each day.

The difference between them is of course that Land writes about monster truck chases and Antarctica exploding, while Alden writes about how one of the worst things about the evil Muslim conquering state is that it’s too feminist. Guess which book is a goofy fun romp and which is an axe-grinding, plodding, mess.

It’s not exactly a difficult question. There is every single New World Order conspiracy played completely straight here, but there are no minotaur-men. On top of that, the ending of The Angola Deception manages to be both too open ended (setting up the later series) and wrapped up too quickly (dealing with the antagonists of that specific book) at the exact same time. How does it manage that? I’m a little awestruck at how it does, but it does.

Suffice to say I don’t recommend this book. I might keep reading the series because I’m crazy and want to see just how crazy it gets (the Invasion series got pretty out-there, but not intentionally). But I don’t recommend it to others.