This is a fairly difficult book for me to review, because I quite enjoyed it but have some serious complaints about not only its content, but the views of its author. The book itself is well researched, and the subject was interesting, being an area and an era with which I’m fairly unfamiliar. The time between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the antebellum years, has always been a bit out of reach for me. I can never really remember which president served at […]
To stare into the abyss and see a vacant soul
Objective Troy (2015) Not previously reviewed for CBR. On September 30, 2011, the US assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Kahn in Al Jawf, Yemen. Both men were American citizens, though only Awlaki had been targeted by the US government. Two weeks later, Awlaki’s 16-year old son, Abdulraman al-Awlaki, was also killed in a drone strike in Yemen, though he wasn’t specifically targeted. He, Awlaki, came to national prominence as a “moderate voice” of Islam following the devastation of 9/11, giving numerous interviews to the media; […]
Resist the urge to go fetal
He was a wannabe gangster and a high school dropout who got tattoos, drank and smoked, and sold drugs on the streets of Jordan. His mother was so concerned, she sent him to Muslim self-help classes. There, Ahmad Fadil found a new path. By the time he was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006, Fadil-by then known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi- had lead a new terrorist insurgency in Iraq and Jordan that resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths. That group was ISIS. […]
If you don’t mind crying in public, pick up this book
I’m not being dramatic. I burst into tears during my lunch break reading Åsne Seierstad’s devastating and chilling account of the 2011 terrorist attack in Norway. I thought about closing my book and pulling myself together, but I was too invested. Instead, I just let my hair cover my face and hope no one noticed. One of Us starts with two teenagers running for their lives. They’re being hunted by a strange man in a police officer’s uniform on a small Norwegian island. Unable to find […]
A Kafkaesque Nightmare
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”– George Orwell, 1984 Ben Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” It’s a sentiment this country has been at odds with since its inception, from the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, […]
Funny exciting spoof of today’s terror/anti-terror geopolitics
If you love spy stories and spoofs of spy stories, you’ll love this debut novel by that sharp-tongued dry-humored wit named Hugh Laurie, best known to Americans for his brilliant but irritating Dr. House television character. Laurie’s hero in The Gun Seller is Thomas Lang, a former Scots Guard turned man-for-hire whose first line in the book is “Imagine that you have to break someone’s arm.” He goes through all the ways such thuggery can be accomplished, and it is not until several paragraphs in […]