Tag: Review

Review: The Road To Wigan Pier

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The Road To Wigan Pier

George Orwell’s 1937 book The Road To Wigan Pier is part travelogue and part philosophical book. It starts off with the wealthy southerner Orwell’s tour of northern mining/industrial England at the pit of the Great Depression. Not only are the struggles of the lower classes shown in gruesomely accurate detail, but one sentence is very darkly prophetic. “We may as well face the fact that several million men in England will – unless another war breaks out – never have a real job this side the grave.”

Now as it turned out, another war did break out. And after that, and not denying the struggles and serious lagging of northern England to this day, things got better for people like them. A lot better. (How much is capitalism and how much is the postwar welfare state is not the point of this review). So while outdated in hindsight, you could see why Orwell was a fervent socialist: Because he understandably thought that things had gotten so bad that a radical change of society was needed.

Yet if the first section of the book is outdated, the second part, where he tears into his fellow socialists, could not be more relevant. Look around every wealthy hard-leftist (but I repeat myself) today and compare them to genuine working class people (even fervently liberal ones), and one can see how little has changed in that regard. Probably the most telling part is his observation that for all their supposed desire to break down classes, most capital-S Socialists Orwell had seen were the most class, prestige, and reputation-obsessed people around.

Review: Downfall of a Revolutionary

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Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary

The book Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary is an excellent account of his final years in Mexico. Seeing the man increasingly decline physically and (arguably) in terms of influence just as much, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Stalin would have been better off letting him fade away instead of unleashing the mountain climbers axe (not an ice pick). Bertrand M. Patenaude tells a story full of tragedy, cruelty, and absurdity in equal measure.

We see the soap opera romance with Frida Kahlo, playing with fire given that her husband was the person most responsible for letting him into Mexico in the first place. Trotsky gets stir crazy being cooped up in an ever more restrictive lair. He gets involved in disputes with western communists who make it clear where Life of Brian got the idea.

The last part is where the book shines historically. Even the most sympathetic accounts of Trotsky have to come to terms with two facts. 1: He was not a liberal person (better than Stalin in that regard is like being better than the 2008 Detroit Lions), and any talk of greater social democracy came after his downfall for selfish reasons. 2: Trotsky was not a good politician and his downfall was near-inevitable because of that.

This is a very good history book that would be great for a movie adaptation ie The Death of Stalin.

Review: The Surge

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The Surge

After seeing the recommendation from Rocky Mountain Navy, I cracked open Adam Kovac’s The Surge. While realistic literary fiction is not normally my cup of tea, 1: The review was excellent, and 2: The book was short, so even if it wasn’t for me, it wouldn’t wear out its welcome.

Well, the book didn’t wear out its welcome. Nor did it really excite me as much as the gushing reviews said it would, I’m sorry to say. The descriptiveness is excellent, but it also acts as padding for what’s still a very short book that, for all its praise, held essentially no surprises, high points, or twists worth mentioning from my perspective.

I just don’t find narrow roman a clef fiction like this particularly interesting, whether at peace or war, so it was going uphill, but even from that baseline it never was more than middling for me.

A Thousand Words: Death Battle

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Everyone since the invention of fiction has wondered “who would win in a fight between ________ and __________ “? For over 15 years and 3 management changes, a web animation series called Death Battle has attempted to ‘answer’ just that. The characters are introduced, quantified, and then an animation plays depicting the fight. The outcome is then explained.

While vs. debaters online can take themselves way too seriously, Death Battle does not. Besides the good and growing quality of the animations, the best part is that the showrunners view it as entertainment and not a “how many Saiyans can dance on the head of a pin” philosophical argument.

If I had to list one current weakness of Death Battle, it’s becoming a victim of its own success. Because it’s gone through most of the obvious pop culture clashes, they either have to do fanservice-y repeats or increasingly obscure characters. The quantification has also gone from “Blastoise’s Hydro Pump is the equivalent of an industrial water cutter in terms of PSI” to a physics lecture. That said, even 2-3 weeks I look forward to seeing each episode.

Review: She’ll Never Get Off The Ground

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She’ll Never Get Off The Ground

Robert Serling’s (yes, the brother of the Twilight Zone guy), was a guy who loved to write about airplanes. In 1971 he wrote probably the most 1971 novel possible, She’ll Never Get Off The Ground. It stars aspiring commercial pilot Dudney Devlin (yes, that name) as she tries to… GOSH, become a “WOMAN AIRLINE PILOT ?!” (save for the capitalization, the punctuation is exactly the same as it is on the cover ?!)

If Devlin was male, this would be a generic 1970s cheap thriller with “I know the designation of the wheel assembly” technical padding. If this was written and published even ten years later, it would be viewed as an anachronistic dinosaur. The International Society of Women Airline Pilots formed in 1978, and while still extremely rare then, the concept was not as inconceivable as it was in the “Mad Men Polyester Housewife Era”.

So this book could only be written and made at a very specific time, and the reasons for that were not good.

A Thousand Words: Nitro Ball

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Nitro Ball

Nitro Ball is a 1992 Data East arcade game based on Midway’s legendary Smash TV, keeping the same basic gameplay and “game show of death” style. While a lot of their games are “we have ____ at home” in terms of quality (to the point where one brought about lawsuits ), this builds on the formula instead of copying it. The “Ball” in the title refers to pinball stages where the contestant can indulge his inner Sonic the Hedgehog, rolling around for bonus points.

The game looks great for the time and starts off in the self proclaimed “Strange Football Field”, full of garish NFL Americana and an amazing music track. Sadly the rest of the game’s style doesn’t match that great start, but it is still a fun and overlooked gem.

Review: Fireworks

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Fireworks

Legendary gun instructor and writer Jeff Cooper wrote (or rather complied, as most he had published before) Fireworks in the late 1970s. Cooper politically was the kind of person who made Jesse Helms seem like a hippie, but the more interesting part is that he was one of the most pretentious writers ever to write. The sympathetic version is that if you’re actually teaching pistol shooting, you have to be very to the point, so writing gave him a chance to stretch his mental legs.

The not so sympathetic version is that Cooper was a perfect example of the kind of person who thinks he is far more intelligent and profound than he actually is. Combine this with being very easily impressed and you have a cross between Hemingway at his worst and your uncle who’s enthralled by this thing called “television”.

This book is entertaining, albeit likely not in the way its author intended.

A Thousand Words: Pokemon Crystal

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With Pokemon Day almost upon us, it’s time to look at the second third installment of Pokemon. Starting with Yellow, Pokemon began releasing a third version of each generation’s game up until Gen 4, at which point it turned into intra-gen sequels and then DLC. But I digress.

Anyway, Crystal has the first female playable protagonist and many other additions, from beautiful animated sprites (not seen again until Gen 5), and the first Battle Tower (a neutralized level location with high risks and reward). It still has the same strengths (large world, very dynamic feel) and weaknesses (terrible level scaling) as the rest of Gen II.

By this time the GBC was old hat and Gen 3 on more powerful hardware awaited. But that’s another story…

Review: T-10 Heavy Tank

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T-10 Heavy Tank

Stephen Sewell’s deep dive into one of the Cold War’s most enigmatic tracked cryptids was a book I knew I had to get. I was not disappointed. Now you have to be interested in tanks to read a very long book about a tank that was only deployed in anger once (the Prague Spring). Thankfully, I’m very interested in tanks.

What makes this fascinating besides the detail is how it represents the end of the road for specialized “heavy” tanks. Yes, MBTs grew to outweigh the heavy tanks, but we see the unified end to one intentional design path taken as far as it went, with quirks like how the T-10 had a heavy instead of medium machine gun for a coax.

I love tanks. I love obscure tanks. So it’s no surprise I love this book.

A Thousand Words: Friday The 13th Part 5

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Friday The 13th Part 5

Friday The 13th Part 5 is a very strange horror movie mixed amidst the conventional genre-making slashers that proceeded and followed it. See, Jason Voorhees had died in the previous film, subtitled “The Final Chapter.” So this was subbed “A New Beginning” and it tried to keep him dead.

The movie takes place at a group home for troubled youth, one of whom, a loser named Joey Burns is murdered by an especially troubled youth. This makes Joey’s father Roy, a paramedic, snap and become a Jason copycat, cementing his ‘fame’ as the Dimitri Medvedev of horror movies.

As far as the actual film itself goes, it’s a delightful mess. The director only knew “DO THE THING” so there’s one scene of murder or sleaze (or both of course) at a very fast pace. It’s not very technically good, but you probably weren’t expecting Citizen Kane from the 5th installment of a horror franchise anyway.