Tag: American

Review: Flight of the Intruder

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Flight of the Intruder

Well, I finally did it and read a classic Vietnam War aviation novel, Stephen Coonts’ Flight of the Intruder. The joke before its infamous film adaptation was released was “Fighter pilots make movies, bomber pilots make history.” Afterwards, it was “Fighter pilots make movies, bomber pilots make bad movies.” Having not seen the film yet (and not likely to sneer, as I enjoyed Iron Eagle of all things), do they make bad books?

The answer in my opinion is kind of but not really but also kinda? Coont’s first novel, this is basically Herman Melville but with A-6s. Read the long, long sequences of a plane doing plane things. The sequences of an attack run. The sequences of a carrier landing. The sequences of doing naughty things in the Philippines. You get the idea. Thing is, even though I didn’t really care for these, I could see the appeal, especially to a non-expert reader back in the past.

So this is another one of those “have I been skewed against this?” books. And there could be worse.

Review: The Machiavelli Covenant

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The Machiavelli Covenant

Allan Folsom’s The Machiavelli Covenant is the story of people walking around Europe in search of a nebulous conspiracy. Kind of like his first novel, The Day After Tomorrow, where people walked around Europe in search of a nebulous conspiracy that involved Adolf Hitler’s preserved head. Here it involves the kind of thing that Jon Land would make and make amazing through ridiculous set pieces. Except here, there aren’t any and the whole thing has a poker face that would have given it millions of earnings in the WSOP.

Well, the set pieces technically are ridiculous, but not in a “wow a monster truck chase” kind of way. More like “ok, it’s the twentieth chapter of people getting in and out of cars.” It’s ridiculous in a not-so-fun way, not a fun way.

I truly believe this book could be a quarter of the length it actually was and still work. I hope it was due to some length obligation by the publisher, but given Folsom’s other work, I really doubt it.

Review: Jaws

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Jaws

Behind every good 1970s movie is a bad 1970s book. Perhaps the ur-example of this saying of mine comes in Peter Benchley’s Jaws. I had heard very little good about the novel but decided I had to see for myself. Well, the shark bit.

I recognized the prose style immediately. And by immediately I mean “A few paragraphs and I recognized the wannabe 1970s pop epic style right away”. Much of the book really feels like someone who wanted to write “‘Arthur Hailey’s’ Tourist Town “, with huge long descriptions of how Long Island resort Amity works, runs, or doesn’t. These are interspersed with long, almost Proust-esque descriptions of things that straddle the line between padding and pretentiousness.

Oh yeah, there’s a shark. Spoiler alert. However, there’s surprisingly little shark. There is a lot of romantic drama and legal drama that Spielberg rightfully threw into the chum bucket. Which is what renders the book nothing but a curiosity. The movie superannuated it. Completely.

Review: America’s Favorite Son

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GG Allin: America’s Favorite Son

The semi-autobiography (it’s a long story) of infamous “punk rocker” GG Allin , America’s Favorite Son is a look into the life and mind of someone who was legitimately not well. Going up to the “Ann Arbor Incident” which resulted in his longest of many prison sentences, the book is honestly disturbing. It does show Allin’s appeal, which was in the same category as the intentional train crashes that Scott Joplin immortalized.

Allin started off as someone who made simple, vulgar punk rock before shedding what talent he had and turning into an outright freak long before his overdose. This book does not paint a good picture of his mental state, and it’s supposed to be sympathetic. But reading it is an experience. Just like watching one of Allin’s “”””concerts””””.

Review: The Last Dive

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The Last Dive

Bernie Chowdhury’s The Last Dive is about one of those ever-evergreen true horror tragedies-a diving accident. With personal knowledge of the victims in the Rouse family, it should be good. But it’s a disappointing book. So much of it is basically an autobiography written in first person. Which is fine but isn’t really the point of the book.

So much theoretical potential amounts to just variants of “they died” (which is about as much of a surprise as The Death of Stalin ) . There’s also “other divers died in similar dives” and “Diving is dangerous.” These three sentences take up a three hundred page book. Which is a shame because the subject matter is so good that the book can’t be all bad. Just mostly bad.

Review: Military Strategy For Writers

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Military Strategy for Writers

I’d love to see a book that can concisely explain strategic concepts to non-army nerds. But Stephen Kenneth Stein’s Military Strategy for Writers is not that book.

The biggest problem is the tone. It’s less “here’s what strategy is and why it’s often overlooked” and more “The generals are idiots, the writers are idiots, but I the great Historian shall tell you why all of them are wrong”, a tone that at absolute best is unhelpful.

It doesn’t help that I see typical pop-history cliche sneers that trigger alarm bells. WRT Vietnam and Iraq, for example it,s “hurr durr greeted as liberators” (during the actual invasion, that was largely accurate) and “Hurr durr us did big conventional war in Vietnam not smart coin like the British in Malaysia ” (they did that because the north was also doing it, with large northern armies being a complication that pure guerilla wars never had).

Ironically you could use Vietnam and Iraq to show the limits of strategy. Like the best case in Vietnam was going to be a Korea-style divided country, likely without South Korea’s economic boom. As a powder keg held together solely by a dictator’s lash and with a neighbor that had the ability to stir up trouble and the reasonable fear it could be next, Iraq was always going to pose a challenge.

Anyway, it fails to balance storytelling. Like yes, you get unrealistic amounts of decisive battles in fiction, but that’s because not every work needs or wants to be a hazy grey tale and because decisive conflict works for storytelling.

Review: Alamo on the Rhine

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Alamo on the Rhine

For the first World War III review of the new year, I turn to T. K. Blackwood’s Alamo on the Rhine, a spinoff/side story of the Iron Crucible 1990s World War III. It’s about a daring strike on a vital air base at the start of the war. Told with the same effectiveness as the other entries, I greatly enjoyed it.

I couldn’t help but see the parallels to Market Garden, Kitona, and Hostomel and wonder what role those historical battles played in the crafting of this book, similar to how I wanted a “Soviet Gulf War” in All Union but not an exact one. It’s to Blackwood’s credit that the excellent story does not come across as a simple historical copy-paste.
This is a very fun book of the kind I haven’t read in a while. Nice job.

Review: Seeking the Bomb

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Seeking the Bomb

Vipin Narang’s Seeking the Bomb is another nuclear proliferation study, this one focusing on how the bomb was sought, not why. This is an incredibly frustrating to read (but very fun to review) book because of how it wobbles across both extremes of political scientist writing.

Right off the bat a gargantuan flaw comes into being: Having a central thesis heavily committed to theories and charts that simply don’t really translate well into an incredibly complex set of situations with a very small sample size. This is disturbingly common in works by political scientists, of which the author is one. It’s also adversarial in its nature and cites multiple kinds of “conventional wisdom” as wrong, including both other scholarly studies and pop-history claims. This feels like a college work in that it’s written to defend a thesis argument rather than simply study the subject.

Fortunately, this book has a lot of strengths as well. It is very well researched and has an effective categorization of nuclear seekers as either hedgers (building up the known capacity but holding back for political reasons), sprinters (just openly moving ahead at all costs), and hiders (trying to keep it concealed until too late). Its story of how India moved from hedging to blatant hedging (doing an unweaponized explosion in 1974 with obvious hints) to just open use is well done as a case study.

Yet I still feel it lacks somewhat in terms of applying technical capacity. This is not to say the book never acknowledges it-it recognizes that South Africa’s ability to make a domestic enrichment plant and other technologies contributed to it being the one successful hider, praises the scholarship of Unclear Physics even as it disagrees with its conclusions, and mentions that Libya’s program was doomed. But I think more detail, more appreciation for both technical challenges and opportunities, and a couple fictional “Nth Country” hypotheticals would have done better. Almost any reasonably advanced country could sprint to a bomb in the kilotons, even if cruder and more dangerous than established ones, if they really wanted to, and I don’t think Seeking the Bomb comes across as appreciating that in its text.

Still, if this is an uneven book it’s an interesting and well-done kind of uneven, and I don’t regret reading it.

Review: The Big Book of Serial Killers

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The Big Book of Serial Killers

It’s hard to find a book with a more accurate title than The Big Book of Serial Killers. This is an A-Z compendium of both solved and unsolved serial murders. Being exactly what it claims to be is… beneficial. It does not shy away from how simultaneously disgusting and pathetic nearly all of them are. Even the smarter ones come across as less Tzeentchian chessmasters and more people who just got away with pulling the same basic trick against soft targets-until they couldn’t.

The book even pads it out by including a few cases of people who weren’t the classic kills-for-the-sake-of it murderers. It includes a handful of terrorists and excessively violent robbers who simply Trevor Phillipsed their way past every victim. The comparative effort of those makes the mentally ill creeps stand out even more.

While its subject matter is obviously not for everyone, this book is excellent for what it is.

Review: Battledrills for Chinese Mobile Warfare

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Battledrills for Chinese Mobile Warfare

Against my better judgement, I got another H. John Poole book. The title made me naively think “oh, this could be a set of practical drills approached from a different perspective.” So like any H. John Poole book, this is about 5% reasonable well-thought out arguments (in this case: Formations should be simpler and grenade skill should be focused and emphasized) mixed with 95% incoherent rambling about how artillery is useless.

The “logic” is a classic all or nothing where if the artillery fails to destroy everything in its path and close combat is still necessary, therefore artillery is useless and only suitable for clunky western armies and not cunning subtle ‘eastern’ ones. He even argues that artillery and aid of artillery has not been useful in the contemporary war in Ukraine, which is… something. But not something good.

By this point Poole has lost most of what teaching value his books had, and I recommend avoiding them.