Tag: American

Review: Atomic Peril

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Atomic Peril

When I saw the words “A nuclear forensics thriller”, I knew I absolutely had to read Atomic Peril. That it’s about nuclear terrorism and involves a scratch-built bomb (a rarity in such cases) made me more eager to finish it. Given the legitimate qualifications of author Sidney Niemeyer, that was even more of a reason to keep going.

The issue is that I know too much. The bomb is a realistic but simple gun type, which is not particularly novel to anyone who knows anything about nuclear weapons beyond the basics. And as a thriller author, its writer is a pretty good nuclear forensics expert. Which is to say the book is a lot more Herman Melville than Tom Clancy. Unsurprisingly, it definitely goes into the “too realistic for its own good if judged as a cheap thriller” category, and even more unsurprisingly, this makes the attempt at a conventional action climax even more dissonant and clumsy.

While I sound like I don’t like this book, I’m actually a lot softer on it than my writing might indicate. Niemeyer had a story he wanted to tell, knowledge that he knew, and was earnest in telling it. And that is to be commended, however many stumbles there are. Besides, if I want a conventional cheap thriller there’s no shortage of “shoot the terrorist before he blows the nuke” books out there.

A Thousand Words: Groundhog Day

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Groundhog Day

It’s Groundhog Day, and the holiday brings two famous events to my mind. One is the time that then-New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, in an event that symbolized his less than stellar mayoralty, fatally dropped a groundhog during a ceremony. The second is of course the Bill Murray movie that is the subject of this post.

The film has a simple time loop premise, to the point where, when describing any other work of fiction with such a cycle, you can just say “like Groundhog Day” and people will understand. Main character Phil Connors goes on a loathed news assignment to Punxsutawney, finds himself snowed in, and then finds it’s the same day again and again and again and again.

What makes it a classic is that it works as both a silly and profound movie. You get both spiritual self-reflection and a man stealing a groundhog before driving off a cliff. The cast of Bill Murray and Andie Macdowell is excellent, and the whole thing is probably one of the greatest holiday films ever.

Review: Earth Fire

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Earth Fire

The ninth Survivalist book and end of the de facto first arc is Earth Fire. It takes the “western Fist of the North Star” theme to its climax as John Rourke prepares his shelter for the firestorm engulfing the world and moves to stop the main Soviet antagonist from using the other suspended animation shelter in Cheyenne Mountain.

I’ve mentioned many times that this was an ideal stopping point for the series. Take this perfectly fine arc and the beginning of Book 10 where Rourke wakes up after the timeskip and sees the Eden Project spaceship lifeboat return and you have an excellent self-contained narrative. As it stood, the series kind of meandered on, becoming first a pet sci-fi setting and then hurriedly sputtering out after 1991.

In fact, later arcs would render this much less important via retcons. Here the Soviet Politburo is shot down as they attempt to reach Cheyenne Mountain because they don’t have a viable shelter of their own. Later on it turns out that the Soviets indeed had an underground city after all! And the Argentines, and the Icelanders, and pretty much everyone! How about that!

Still, this is a fine piece of ridiculous 80s excessive men’s adventure, and can be appreciated for what it is. The later sourness doesn’t make this any less sweet.

A Thousand Words: Half Past Dead

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Half Past Dead

2002’s Half Past Dead was Steven Seagal’s final effort in mainstream cinema before he collapsed entirely into sus no-budget cheapies. Both a rip-off of the earlier and far better The Rock in the exact same setting (Alcatraz) and the general “Die Hard in a ______” trend that was several years out of date, it did not exactly breathe new life into his career.

A story of supervillains storming Alcatraz (see what I said about that other movie), the film is notable for two things besides just having a washed-up Seagal in it. The first is how desperately they tried to go for the “Edgy Extreme” trend of the late 90s and early 2000s, dragging in rappers and garish overcut camera angles to try (unsuccessfully) to put lipstick on the pig. The second is that this is one of the first appearances of the ubquituous Steven Seagal Stunt Double, used for as much as they could get away with. The “Stunt Double” would reach new heights in Seagal’s later films where it would be used not just for any mild exertion, but for things like walking peacefully.

Amazingly, one of the few highlights is “49er 6”, the femme fatale villain played by a 40 year old soap opera actress (Nia Peeples). She apparently relished doing her own stunts, and that is a far cry from Seagal the Double-Man.

As a time capsule/MST3K-style so bad its good, you could do worse than this movie. But I wouldn’t put it anywhere near the top of the cheap thriller pyramid.

Review: The Occupation

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The Occupation: A John Warren Novel

My Amazon recommended reading list is filled with all kinds of postapocalyptic wilderness guerilla commando survival books. And none are portrayed as pulpy as Jerry Ahern’s Survivalist. While I generally had little interest in such novels, it got to the point where I figured I might as well try one out. So I chose WJ Lundy’s The Occupation.

Starting with a boilerplate Evil Woke Corporate Dystopia (complete with Evil Foreign UN Peacekeepers to round out the League of Evil), it of course ends up with rural guerilla resistance. And in what I suspect is a common theme even though I’ve only read a little of the genre, it’s very heavy on the tactical maneuver minutia. Like it’s mercifully restrained in detailing the various models of guns involved, but in terms of execution it’s rather different. Which isn’t the worst thing.

And neither is this book. It could be better, but in terms of 51% entertainment, you could certainly do a lot worse.

Review: The Last of the Dog Team

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The Last of the Dog Team

William W. Johnstone said that of all his many, many writings, The Last of the Dog Team was his proudest work. This is yet more proof that his ability to judge what made a “good” book was lacking. As if the dozens and dozens of terrible slop on paper wasn’t enough evidence.

Anyway, The Last of the Dog Team is about Terry Kovak, a poor boy turned supercommando. Or rather, it’s mostly about his, uh, “love life”. See, he has the magic power of making women want him desperately. If he really was a secret agent, he’d be perfect for Romeo Gambits. The plot, such as it is, is of a violent lunatic (ie, Kovak) killing people in his hometown, in Southeast Asia, and in Africa before returning to a reluctant retirement and then dying of natural causes.

The prose is bad and erratic even by Johnstone’s standards, veering between Exclamation Points!, long syrupy purple prose, and lines like “He felt drained-which he was. He felt sick”. And yet the key factor is its pretentiousness. It’s clear that Johnstone wanted to write some sweeping epic saga of a man’s life yet had simply no idea how to do so without throwing in another sex or killing scene. This sort of overreach (much of the Ashes series is a redneck convinced he’s Larry Bond) is something WWJ had and many other bottom-feeder thrillers (including the later “William W. Johnstone’s” did not.

Since this was an early book of his, I could forgive Johnstone if he got better. He didn’t.

Review: Interception

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Interception: The Secrets of Modern Sports Betting

Ed Miller and Matthew Davidow are two of the sharpest (word choice deliberate) and most experienced minds in sports betting. This made me have very high expectations for Interception, their most recent book on the sports betting ecosystem. I’m delighted to say that it only took a few pages for it to outright exceed them.

For me specifically, it was a little less of an experience in that I already knew most of the plain facts stated within (the tricks you think will work will not, sportsbooks offer far more markets than they can realistically handicap so they use restrictions to ‘counter’, etc…) But I still found it enlightening and illuminating. And for a newcomer it’d be vastly more so. The one thing I had against it was how its tone was a little snarky for my taste, but that’s a mild stylistic complaint.

Anyway, you need to read this to understand sports betting and how it’s going. This book has also made me ever-more convinced that a modest minimum bet liability law would be extremely beneficial to the sports betting ecosystem, but that’s a topic for another post. As it stands, it’s the best sports betting book I’ve read.

A Thousand Words: The Sting

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The Sting

The Robert Redford classic The Sting is a movie about Great Depression-era con artists pulling a dangerous game against a powerful mobster. A well-regarded movie, I would reckon it’s one of the best films to center around sports betting. Why?

Well, the plot that the protagonists are (supposedly) pulling involved horse racing, and the central scheme of outrunning the official updates to place advantageous bets is something I knew very well. Combined with excellent cinematography and performances, this is a 70s masterpiece.

Review: The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook

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Say there’s a crusty football coach who ran teams back in the days of Jim Thorpe and leather helmets. You’re at a coaches analytics and strategy meeting. There’s Bill Walsh and there’s Paul Zimmerman, talking about the evolution of the NFL. Then in comes this ninety-something coach who says “You know, you can throw the ball if you have to”, because in his time and mind, the forward pass was a novelty. But even by the start of the Super Bowl era, even in run-dominant periods postwar, it simply wasn’t.

This is how I felt when reading the New Maneuver Warfare Handbook by the infamous William Lind.

It starts with a pompous retelling of the generations of war and has a paragraph where he says “4GW” is not insurgency or guerilla war, but rather war against non-state actors. In other words, it’s not COIN/guerilla war, just war against insurgents and guerillas. Ok.

One running theme in histories of this Pentagon Reformer is that Lind, regardless of merits, was a terrible salesman. And it comes across here, where he keeps referring back to some German general or another he met in 197X and generally coming across as loving the sound of his own voice. His dismissal of every small unit encounter in Iraq/Afghanistan as “bumping into the enemy and then calling for fire” with the implication that only the equivalent of a 100% perfect never spotted run in a stealth game would be good enough for him.

Only about eighty pages of the 200 page book are the “main event”, and the amount of actual substance there is less. Lind recommends the fellow Special Tactics press books in the style of an internet video maker getting the sponsorships out of the way. Which is ironic because those, with their small and clear focuses, are the antithesis of his work. Which here involves a lot of blathering and told-you-so with a huge dose of selection bias.

The many appendices, some of which are not written by Lind, are somewhat better. It’s important to note that the themes of realistic effective training, mission type command, and even maneuvering are not necessarily bad ones (even if I disagree with the particulars). The only problem is that this is about 3% useful stuff that can and has been said elsewhere and 97% self-important back-patting. There’s a reason why other maneuver war advocates considered Lind a liability.

Review: Fenimore Coopers Literary Offenses

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Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses

Fuldapocalypse now turns its attention to noted World War III author Mark Twain. I have to share Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses because as a child, it was the kind of thing that made me guffaw massively. And still does. Since I have not read any of Cooper’s actual novels, if I was to do so now it would probably be something like watching a Jean-Luc Goddard movie after the Monty Python “French Subtitled Film” sketch that parodied it massively.

Twain was proceeding Mystery Science Theater 3000 by a century and it was amazing. Whether or not he was accurate in his critique of Cooper, it was certainly fun to read. (Also fun fact: The home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, was named after the author. Twain would have had a field day critiquing the ballots of writers who do things like vote for steroid-tarred Gary Sheffield but not Bonds or Clemens).