Tag: American

Review: Kill Kill

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Kill Kill: Battle of Fallujah

One of the recent very pleasant surprises for me was Chance Nix‘s Kill Kill, a historical cheap thriller (yes it makes sense in context) set in the titular battle of Fallujah. Rest assured that this is a book rather different in tone from the last such novel I reviewed, Dodgebomb. However, I feel comfortable saying that a veteran of the actual war with a purple heart is welcome to write however he pleases.

This has the tone of a cheap thriller, but there’s just enough “aha, a veteran would know this” detail (especially the dialogue) to make it feel grounded, and more importantly it comes across as reaching the tone it aimed for. While the character archetypes are the kind that were old when Homer was young, they also fit their role and I can’t complain about them.

Also realistically and somewhat daringly for a cheap thriller, Nix is not afraid to kill off his protagonists. In fact, he actually kills too many, with the number of character deaths in that one segmented viewer totaling around 15-25% of the actual American KIA in the historical battle. Which is… uh, a plausibility critique I never thought I’d be making about a cheap thriller.

Anyway, while this book is rough around the edges, it’s a good read and I eagerly recommend it.

A Thousand Words: The Woodstock Movie

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Woodstock

The Woodstock music festival is probably the most overrated cultural event ever. A ramshackle mess that could have very easily turned into a 1960s Fyre Festival or something much worse, all it gave was a huge mess in an upstate farm, music, and… a documentary film.

A massive reason-perhaps the biggest reason-why the concert is so well remembered is Michael Wadleigh’s masterpiece. Easily the best documentary/concert film I’ve seen, it cuts from the performances (of varying quality in every sense of the word) to interviews with dazed hippies, musicians, and the festival organizers, to things like the rainstorm and Wavy Gravy’s pronouncements, all done with amazing cinematic skill.

I could point out that despite being intended to be sympathetic, the interview subjects and even the whole festival doesn’t exactly look the best. But that’s the beauty of it, with the film being detailed and close (again in multiple senses) enough to give the viewer enough evidence to a make a judgement call. Its main goal was to chronicle, and chronicle it did.

Review: Blood Trails

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Blood Trails

A novella of Texans hunting terrorists, Nicholas Orr’s Blood Trails is not very substantive. On one hand, it’s short and its plot is nothing that hasn’t been done many times before. That’s not an obstacle to a good book, and neither is the “Herman Melville’s Guide To Patrolling” exposition.

What is an obstacle is the fact that the final climactic battle also reads just as dryly as those infodumps. This is the one thing a thriller cannot be, and it’s what turns it from a possible 51% snack into a rejection in my eyes. Which is a shame, but oh well.

Review: The Athlete

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The Athlete

With football/handegg season now upon us, I figure a sports book is in order. As good as any other is Jon Finkel’s The Athlete, a biography of Charlie Ward, a quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy and then went on to a long and successful pro career…. as a basketball player. Especially since, by basketball standards anyway, Ward wasn’t even very tall.

To get the negative out of the way, this is a rose-tinted view of him that excuses one of his most infamous incidents (which thankfully just amounted to him saying something dumb and not doing anything). It also praises him as if he was Jim Thorpe or Bo Jackson, which is just a little too much in my eyes. But it’s still an interesting look at a man who succeeded in two places where almost everyone can’t succeed in one.

A final interesting piece is that Finkel doesn’t really try to answer the counterfactual everyone is going to ask: Could Ward have been a viable NFL quarterback? Could have been Russell Wilson two decades earlier, or an undersized runt who’d get crushed by pro defenders? The correct answer is “We don’t know”, but it’s a little disappointing to not even consider it.

While not the best book, this is a good look at someone I knew growing up from his time on the Knicks.

Review: Tank Warfare

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Jeremy Black’s Tank Warfare is a history of the century-plus history of the metal tracked armored vehicle known as the tank. Published in 2020, it wasn’t able to cover the wars in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, but that’s not its fault. There are however a significant amount of things that are its fault.

The book is a popular history broad-brush overview. Perhaps its biggest weakness is that it’s too broad for its own good. Tangets towards every tank developed and exported by everyone in the time period happen at the expense of actually exploring the topic. Which would be more tolerable if it hadn’t actually focused on World War I in depth simply because there were few types of tanks to cover. The balanced look at the earliest AFVs there give a picture of what might have been.

This is basically just a generic coffee table tank book, but it had the potential to be more.

Review: Is There Life After Football

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Is There Life After Football: Surviving The NFL

A look at life as an American Football player by sociologists and former NFL player James Koonce, Is There Life After Football is a very interesting and evenhanded tale of how football players (and to a degree many other athletes) struggle culturally. While very few of its points are surprising or shocking, it’s well-written and handled.

The authors are eager to debunk some of the skewed and sensationalist claims of football players recklessly spending piles of money and then ending up as brain-damaged hobos. Careful to cite formal studies, they point out that there isn’t a disproportionately high amount of either financial or legal trouble amongst NFL veterans (a point others such as former player Merrill Hoge have made)-but that it still can and does often happen, with a look at the cultural dynamics to see why.

Indeed this manages to mostly avoid the twin sportswriting perils of what I call the “Johnny Manziel” and “Colin Kaepernick” paths, to use two quarterbacks who both got (in?)famous for things that had nothing to do with their play on the field. The Manziel route is classic media focusing on the freak show excesses, portraying the players as overpaid, under-mature babies, often with moral scolding. (Spoiler alert: Some players are just that). The Kaepernick route is the more modern “sensibility” in which every single player is an underpaid exploited victim of Evil Capitalist Society.

If I had to quibble, I’d say that they lump NFL players too closely together. The stats are skewed by short-career replacement level players, and the compartmenalization of different positions and paths is well-known. Their talk of the “conveyor belt” should have brought more attention to hyped prospects who flame out. The authors mention old-timers who had to work in the offseason and bubble fringe players who knew very well that they were living on the edge. But I’d be curious to see the end result of the worst of all worlds-a sheltered pampered college stardom followed by just legitimately not having the talent to match at the pro level.

But these are minor concerns for an excellent book.

Review: Trial By Fire

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Harold Coyle’s Trial by Fire is about a…. second Mexican-American war? Uhh? Oh, it was published in 1992. That explains everything. Besides the (long) setup and (shorter) conflict, we get one of the most controversial cheap thriller characters beginning here: Female infantry commander Nancy Kozak, who has a less than ideal reputation among Coyle’s readers.

Sadly, the book once against reinforces my view of Coyle as a one-hit wonder whose Team Yankee, magisterial as it was, could not be exceeded or equaled by any other book by the same author. It’s a weird anti-Goldilocks mixture of either too fast or too slow, and the understandable but contrived background does it no favors. Hate to say it, but… just read Team Yankee again, IMO.

Review: Blood of the Ancients

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Blood of the Ancients

Like Jerry Ahern, John Schettler decided to take the Kirov series into outright science fiction. Gone are the purely terrestrial squabbles, replaced with sci-fi spaceship battles against aliens and, in this case, an attempt at a John Carter of Mars Homage in Blood of the Ancients. Although much of the book takes place on Earth as the ancient “Sons of Ares” change the past in secret alternate history, this is obviously John Carter through and through.

The issue is that Schettler is not the most inherently suited to write this kind of flowery planetary romance. It would be like a fluffy romance author writing a technothriller. Despite this, it’s a sincere and well-appreciated effort. Who knows, maybe Kirov will turn to nonviolent romantic drama next…

Review: Midnight Ops

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Midnight Ops

Midnight Ops is the latest Duncan Hunter book by Mark Hewitt . It is also not just the worst in the series but the worst “thriller” novel that I’ve read. Ever. At least as of this post. And I do not mean this lightly. Having read literally hundreds of these books, I’ve reached the point.

So the Amazon blurb mentions a defecting F-22 that flew to North Korea as the MacGuffin. Well you will be “glad” to hear that it takes two thirds of the book to even reach that point at all. And then it goes back to what it was previously doing. What was it doing?

Political rants. I’d say it’s like reading the Facebook page of your boomer uncle from rural Oklahoma, but that would be an insult to boomer uncles from rural Oklahoma. If you trained an AI model on nothing but conspiracy talk radio transcripts and then let it rip for five hundred pages, you’d have this book. But I’m still pretty sure the AI could do better.

The worst part is that I used to like this series! It had the same ridiculously right-wing politics and unstoppable Mary Sue, but could be fun in a Mack Maloney manner. This isn’t. The actual ‘action’ is the same repetitive easy victories that feels like an afterthought. It’s easy to tell the real emotion is in the rants.

So yes, I’ve found the new worst (thriller) novel ever. Welp.

A Thousand Words: Clue

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Clue

As proof that movies based on bizarre IPs are not a new thing, 1985 saw the release of a film based on the board game Clue. Thankfully the board game has a basic plot of “murder mystery”, which the movie uses. It ends up killing a lot more than Mr. Boddy.

This movie is not “good” by any means, but it falls into the category of “a lot better than it could have been” and is perfectly fun for a time waster. Its multiple ending gimmick at least tries to be experimental and interesting (it was intended to have different theaters show different ‘definitive’ endings). And the John Morris score is underrated and excellent.