Tag: Review

Review: The Quiet War

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The Quiet War

I must confess by this point I read The Quiet War just because I wanted to see just how far down Mark Hewitt’s Duncan Hunter series could go. Two chapters in, I was not disappointed. We get a padded flashback chapter where every single technical name is spelled out in full like it was a late Gold Eagle book, and then an example of the gargantuan homophobia the series became infamous for. And another. And another. The “flashback” chapters reach double digits, treating us to such horrors from the main character’s perspective as The Beatles.

This is not a book about a super-plane, even though there’s a chapter where it effortlessly crushes its opposition (like it has always done in the series). This is a book about gay communists. This sounds like some online insult, but it’s actually the factual book subject matter (besides said squash and a past article about the main character finding a treasure chest.) Tirades about how a cabal of gay communists were steered by the USSR into sabotaging America make up most of this. And the previous book. And…

So this isn’t even amusingly bad. It’s just on repeat.

A Thousand Words: The Punisher 1989

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The Punisher (1989)

Marvel in the 1980s did not have the resources DC had when it came to movie adaptations. So while Superman and Batman got massive, well produced, praised movies with all star casts, Marvel got stuff like… the 1989 Punisher. Where the biggest star was Dolph Lundgren, and getting Louis Gossett as another character probably took up most of the rest of the budget.

Thing is, this isn’t really that bad. Not because of the actual movie itself, which is a sleazy low budget action thriller. But rather because the Punisher is uniquely suited to sleazy low budget action thrillers in ways most other superheroes aren’t. So unlike say, the awful 1990 Captain America, this at least has a reach that doesn’t exceed its grasp. And there are worse things than sleazy low budget action thrillers.

Review: The View From Sunset Boulevard

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The View From Sunset Boulevard

Although published in 1979 and focusing on the year 1977, very little has changed about the subject matter of Ben Stein’s The View From Sunset Boulevard. Stein, though an infamous conservative, makes it clear he is not trying to grind an axe but rather sincerely identify how the Hollywood Blob (my words, not his) achieves its thought. One statement sets the tone.

“All of them, even the ones with millions of dollars, believed themselves to be part of a working class distinctly at odds with the exploiting classes – who, if the subject came up, were identified as the Rockefellers and multinational corporations. For an obscure reason, the name of Nixon was also thrown in frequently.”

The book has one terrible weakness: It identifies the breaks from reality that television (especially then) suffered, but doesn’t try to counterbalance by seeing how much of it was just done for the sake of dramatic effect (like having to wrap everything up in one episode as the most obvious). Yes, Stein makes it clear that much of what the TV writers choose to show (and most importantly, do not show/display), is what they believe. But he doesn’t quite go ‘how much isn’t. ‘

That said, it has better strengths. Stein makes some points even I didn’t think of before: Like how since the world of television writing is surprisingly lean without much direct experience with large bureaucracies, writers get frustrated with how problems can’t be instantly solved in real life. And many I have, like how the enemies are always businessmen. (This reached new depths in the 70s with the made for TV Captain America movies: Despite having the politically safest enemy ever in The Red Skull, Captain America’s opponent was…. an OC oil tycoon named Lou Brackett who wanted to detonate a neutron bomb for… reasons.)

The most interesting is how prone to from a distance ridiculous conspiracies so many TV screenwriters were. My favorite part was Stein describing how, since he worked for Nixon, people seriously asked him about inside info he must have had on the League Of Evil clearly ruling the world.

The bias of television writing is obvious. But this explains the similarity and banality, which in a different manifestation still exists now and then some.

Review: History, Force Structure, And Tactics of the Russian Airborne Troops

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The Russian Way of War: History, Force Structure, and Tactics of the Russian Airborne Troops.

Legendary Kremlinologists Lester Grau and Charles Bartles have a new free gargantuan book out on the Russian VDV. It’s hosted/sponsored by the Polish General Tadeusz Kościuszko Military University of Land Forces for pretty obvious reasons. While an excellent book, there’s a part I found extra amusing.

See, the OPFOR used to be as Soviet/Russian as possible. In the 21st Century, it slowly drifted away (even as high-intensity war took re-precedence post Iraq) from its roots understandably. Now Grau and Bartles are criticizing it (at least in terms of fidelity to Russian doctrine) for not being bearish enough. It’s just an amusing footnote.

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.