Doubleshot

Doubleshot  by Raymond Benson

I really loved the first three Raymond Benson authored James Bond books.  I guess, as the law of averages go, it was only a matter of time before I would consume one that would be a bit less than spectacular.  Alas, this was the case for Benson’s fourth Bond book.

Benson was always a major fan of the Bond books, and really only seemed to like the films if they were identical to the books.  So you can imagine his distaste for the movies once Roger Moore took over as the super spy, and also when John Gardner took over as the authorized author.  When Benson took over in the late 1990s, one of his main intentions was to bring the “old” Bond “back”.  I suppose that’s a good thing, and as mentioned, his first three books were very strong.

As far as the “old” Bond, it should be mentioned that Benson has created a major crime syndicate for many of his books called “The Union”.  Let’s just say that “The Union” very closely resembles Ian Fleming’s SPECTRE – right down to their clandestine meeting locations amongst the leaders in the middle of nowhere, to their mysterious intimidating “leader”  (he’s blind, but he seems to be able to “see” everything – especially when his lieutenants are trying to cheat the organization).  Benson introduced us to “The Union” in his previous Bond work “High Time to Kill”.  In that book, Bond obviously thwarted the baddies, so in this book, "The Union" is out for revenge.

Another feature of the “old” Bond, especially the literary Bond, is that he was more human.  He wasn’t quite as untouchable as the guy we see on the screen.  This has some advantages as well in some cases, but not so much in this book.  It seems as though Bond was pretty beat up at the end of his last adventure, so this book has the poor guy limping around between the pages looking worn, with black circles under his eyes, seeing hallucinations, taking handfuls of pills to help splitting headaches, and nearly passing out all of the time.   This isn’t how I like to picture 007 throughout an entire adventure.

Then, I found the plot to be rather stupid.  It seems as though “The Union” has managed to find (or construct) a replica (hence the title) of James Bond.  I don’t really like books that expect me to believe that a virtual clone can somehow be created of another human being.  So, anyway, another Bond is created that happens to look, act, and talk just like the original, and he’s doing some really “bad” things.  This, you see, is so the powers that be (such as M and her staff) become so confused and think that Bond has finally “turned”.  So they try to stop him, hence hindering the man’s plans.

Speaking of “doubles”, it seems as though Bond meets a lovely pair of sexified kittens in the book that are identical twins.  He meets the first one on a train somewhere and manages to score a date.  He then sees the twin, not realizing it’s a different person, and resumes talking about the future rendezvous.  Of course, being the clueless sister, she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, screams something like “Pervert!” and storms out.  No wonder the guy has persistent headaches.  Side note: If this happened in real life, wouldn’t the twin be able to figure out that the poor guy was actually talking to the sister?  I mean, I would assume a set of twins would get used to this sort of thing happening frequently.  Eventually, all works out well and the confusion is cleared up.  Still though, the entire time we spend with Bond and the twins reminds you of a bad Disney movie (except for the “sexified” part).

Without going into too much detail, the plot follows a pretty straight formula, and it doesn’t take much of a genius to figure out what’s going on, and stay one step ahead of the author, even though he thinks he’s fooling you.

Overall, this reminded me of a John Gardner Bond book, which really isn’t a compliment.  Gardner’s books usually fell somewhere in the “mediocre-o.k.” department, which is where this one belongs.  Benson’s first three Bond novels were much better, and I hope I’ll be able to say the same thing about the last two once I tackle them.

Mexico

Mexico by James Michener

James Michener was an incredible author.  Regardless of whether or not you liked the majority of his work, his research that he put into his books was simply breathtaking.  Not only were many of his books in excess of 800-900 pages, but those pages were packed with information.  His books were not for the novice, nor could one breeze through one of his works over a mere weekend.

The majority of his books were actually about places as opposed to people.  Note titles such as Alaska, Poland, Texas, Chesapeake, and this one as well.  Although his work was fiction, he had the remarkable ability to use a location as the main character of his stories, and would tell stories of characters that lived in the particular location – sometimes stretching back over thousands of years.  Usually the book would start in (or close to) present day, with some sort of historian, teacher, author, etc. arriving at a location, reflecting a bit about the particular place, and then Michener would propel us to the past and the real “story” would begin.  Usually, Michener would tell about eight or ten different tales, each one jumping to the next by about a century, with mostly new characters (obviously), yet they were somehow connected (usually related) to players in the previous section.  So in a sense, we would almost get a family history.  Again, though, it was the geographic location that was really the main focus, and served as the foundation for the stories throughout the pages.

Mexico was one of Michener’s last books.  He was well into his eighties, and sadly, this isn’t close to being one of his best.  Whether or not the man’s advancing age had anything to do with it, I’m not sure, but the majority of things I’ve read by him were much better than this one.

This book actually starts out o.k.  We meet journalist Norman Clay who, despite his anglo-sounding name, has strong ties to this country.  It’s present day (or close -1961 I believe), and Clay has been assigned to the (fictional) city of Toledo to cover a bull fight.  Michener uses the bull fight to begin to explore the various cultures and customs of Mexico, as we meet a few different bull fighters from different backgrounds.  Example: one bull fighter is a “pure” Spaniard, whereas another is an authentic “Indian”.  We're then treated to a nice primer of the different races of people and their customs.  After about 100 pages or so, Michener puts us in the customary time machine, and we’re bolted back to around the year 600 A.D., and the real adventure begins.

Everything is great until around the end of the first quarter of the book.  Michener then takes us back to present day Norman Clay, and we get more bull fighting.  A lot of bull fighting.  It seems as though Clay is now “entertaining” some Americans and begins a longwinded saga explaining bull fighting to his guests.  There’s simply too much mundane information here to be of interest.  I kept wanting Michener to go back several centuries and continue his normal story telling journey.  Alas, we spend too much time in the present day, and by the time you’re halfway through this book, you realize this isn’t going to be a typical Michener.  Yes, we eventually do go back in time, but there’s too few pages learning about the country’s ancestors, and he keeps bouncing back to the present day bullfight.  It kind of reminded me of watching an interesting special on PBS, only to have it interrupted every 15 minutes for their annoying pledge drives.

A normal Michener consists of about 15% “present day” and 85% “the rich authentic past”, whereas this book seems about 60-40.  The 40% that gave us the history lesson is quite pleasant, but you simply have to wonder why the ratio was so screwed up for this book.  Again, maybe the author was losing his touch.  I would recommend “skimming” the present day pages once you’re about 200-300 pages into the novel, but it’s worth it to take the time when we do, in fact, travel back several centuries.  It should also be noted that there are several important things about Mexico’s history that are obviously missing from this book, and you have to wonder why they’re not included.   We must remember, however, that Michener did write a novel on Texas (one of his best and longest), which was actually part of Mexico until the 1840s.  So maybe the author didn’t want to duplicate certain events of history that he already covered?

Regardless, this one was a bit of a let-down, but there are masses of material from his catalog that are, in fact, quite satisfying.

The Blue Nowhere

The Blue Nowhere by Jeffery Deaver

For this novel, thrill-a-minute author Jeffery Deaver takes on the internet as the main source of horror and terror.  The internet?  What’s so terrible about the internet?  According to Jeffery Deaver, plenty.  First, we must remember that this book was written back in 2001 (13 years, believe it or not, prior to my writing this review).  Back in 2001, personal computers were just starting to really take off and become a “regular” in most households.  It seemed like everyone on the block had their own machine, and some families even had (-gulp-) two of them!  Yes, many were already using online tools such as the world wide web, but high speed connections, chat rooms, and sites where you could upload, download, and view streaming files were just now becoming the norm.

Turns out that there are some odd characters out there in the real/virtual world, and some have no morals nor scruples it would seem.  A network (pardon the pun) of people known as “hackers” are some of the more widely known.  Their passion?  They break into secure files housed by those in authority such as the government and large corporations.  The majority of these hackers don’t really want to do any harm, they just look at overcoming such barriers as a personal challenge.

This story focuses around two such individuals.  One hacks for the sake of enjoyment, but the other is clearly deranged, and is using his knowledge to randomly find people and kill them.  It seems like, at one point prior to this story, there existed a popular virtual, on-line game that existed where you could virtually find people in a virtual world, and the object of the game was to virtually kill them.  Well, our bad guy (known as “Phate”) decides to keep the game going by living out this twisted story in reality, so he’s out breaking into peoples computers, amassing data, stalking them, and killing them.

So the police turn to a “good guy” hacker.  Well, sort of a good guy.  He’s actually in prison.  Why?  For hacking, of course.  Wyatt Gilette is actually a pretty decent fellow.  He’s never really wanted to hurt anyone, and the police realize that they need his brains and expertise to track down “Phate”.

So the story takes us into these bizarre character’s lives and, if anything, we learn a lot about these computer geniuses and their environments.  These “hackers” are serious.  How serious?  Well, whenever they set about for a couple of days of hard core hacking (with basically no sleep), they have to prepare for their session by obtaining several backup computer keyboards.  Why?  Because they type so fast and furious, that they break the keys on the keyboard causing them to have to discard it and move onto another.  When these characters do sleep, they don’t talk in their sleep, they hack in their sleep.  So as we observe them in slumber-land, their fingers are  in fast motion, typing imaginary code as the rest of their body shuts down.

For all of the computer jargon in this book, there are some in the educated field that claim that author Jeffery Deaver gets a lot of his facts wrong about certain details.  That may be true, but that never seemed to bother me (I remember Peter Benchley, the author of “Jaws” making such claims about the Spielberg movie.  Most, like me, didn’t care since it was so enjoyable).  Deaver also includes a handy glossary at the beginning of the book so we can easily refer to many of terms, jargon and acronyms that are second nature to computer nerds.

There’s a lot of cat and mouse chasing in this book.  It’s difficult to hide and try to find people in the virtual world.  I mean, how can I use my computer to find your location if you have access to my computer and you know that I’m trying to use it to find your location?  So there’s a lot of “we found him!” and then “He somehow escaped!”, but I still really enjoyed the high speed online world that Deaver takes us to.  I can also see how one can easily become paranoid of the online world of computers thinking that there really could be people such as this out there lurking behind every virtual door.

I found this book to be very similar to a lot of what Jeffery Deaver has written, but there were so many fresh angles and new corners to peak in, that I still found this book to be a great, wild read - even though it may be a bit “dated” all these years later.

Plague Ship

Plague Ship by Clive Cussler and Jack DuBrul

I’ve heard it said that Clive Cussler really has very little to do with all of these books that he seems to co-author as of late.  This wouldn’t surprise me since there does seem to be an awful lot published material in the past few years.  It seems as though there are about four or five people that Cussler regularly co-authors, and the books seem to be released fast and frequently.  In some aspects, this process probably works as designed if true.  The lesser known co-author gets some notoriety, and book publishers are guaranteed more profits with a well known name on the book jacket (along with an eye catching graphic of some kind of water vessel in turmoil.  This one is a great example).

The books by these two joint authors are dubbed “The Oregon Files”.  I seem to recall that the Oregon was a ship (not 100% sure, but you get the point) that had a regular “cast of characters” that lead us through the story.  The ship’s captain and main character of the story is Juan Cabrillo.  Juan is a capable leader.  He’s no Dirk Pitt nor Kurt Austin, but I don’t mean that in necessarily a bad way.  In other words, he’s not infallible.  Also, since most of the story takes place on, or close to the Oregon, all of the supporting characters are close by, and the authors give a lot of page time to the supporting characters.  I’m guessing there were about ten or twelve regulars in and out of the pages.

The book starts of with an “intro” that is quite irrelevant to the main story.  The Oregon is in Iranian waters trying to steal weapons sold to the Iranians by the Russians.  This intro is designed to simply to allow the reader to become assimilated to Cabrillo and his crew.  To be honest, it goes on a bit too long.  After the escapade, the Oregon stumbles on a plot (sinister, of course) by some misguided barons to obliterate most of the earth’s population.  You see, they believe that the earth is just too crowded, and since we don’t have plagues or world wars anymore, there’s nothing to keep the world’s population to expand beyond what it should.  So plans are made to initiate a catastrophe obliterating most of the earth’s people, and the crew of the Oregon must move, and move fast to stop such an event.

What happens throughout the rest of the story is pretty much what you would expect from a Cussler story, regardless of whether or not he had a big hand in writing this particular book.  It’s the minor details and intricacies that tend to differ significantly.  Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  I remember the first time I read one of the “NUMA Files” books, I found it to be a carbon copy of the Dirk Pitt adventures.  Juan Cabrillo is much more serious about his work, and doesn’t seem to bleed invincibility like a Dirk Pitt or a Kurt Austin.  He also doesn’t have time to seduce any damsels in distress.  The problem for me is what details are here, I didn’t find all that interesting.  I found myself not really wanting to pick this book up after I was about halfway through.  I figured I pretty much knew what was going to happen, and since it wasn’t that interesting, why bother?

But pursue I did, and I did find the latter half more interesting with some slight surprises thrown in for good measure.  Would I read another one of the “Oregon” books?  Probably.  Am I in a rush to do so?  Probably not.  You can’t help but compare Clive Cussler the “co-author” to Clive Cussler the “author”, and sadly, this is where the story leaves you wanting  a bit more.

American Heritage History of World War 2

American Heritage History of World War 2  by Stephen Ambrose and C.L Sulzberger

A Kindle “bargain” on Memorial Day.  I would have been happy had I paid the full price.  There have been so many books about the second world war,  and many by author Stephen Ambrose.  Most would argue that Ambrose has written many of the most well received and well known.  This book does its due diligence in that it doesn’t really focus on one, or a few, certain aspects of the particular conflict, it’s simply a  somewhat condensed volume detailing just about everything related to the tragedy.

Due to the vast subject material here, this book could have been several volumes, since it deals with the entire war, but Ambrose and co-author C.L. Sulzberger give the reader just enough information to provide the uninformed enough details to understanding the who’s, when’s, where’s and why’s.

You could make the argument that this is a “Cliffs Notes” type book, but it’s not necessarily a brief read, although there are many other books that are definitely much more long and expanded.  This would be a good book for a high school student that might be curious.

For someone such as myself who has read a large number of accounts already, there was much in this book that I already knew.  Such a compact piece really can’t afford to go into too many deep revelations.  What I found somewhat refreshing is the treatment of the war outside of the battle and the combat zone.  That might seem a bit of an oxymoron, but there are, for example, a couple of chapters talking about what life was like “back home”.  In America, for instance, there was definitely a sense of patriotism and pride, but also fear and trepidation.  Apart from the attack on Pearl Harbor (and Hawaii wasn’t a U.S. state back then, remember) there is virtually no conflict on the continent.  So in a sense, the Americans had it “good”.  That seems a bit bold, and the authors ensure that it was no picnic, especially since everyone living in the United States, it seemed, was related to someone overseas, so the fear never dissipated.  Yet compared to places such as London, Berlin, Shanghai and Sicily, those in the U.S.A. at least never had to worry about their houses being bombed, their possessions being looted, or the women being savaged.  So it was nice to see a book about the war and how it affected those that weren’t literally fighting in it.

This was a relatively quick read, and it should also be pointed out that the Kindle version does not include the illustrations - which tended to leave many purchasers feeling a bit gypped.  I suppose pictures would enhance (when do they not?), but I didn’t think they were necessary.  I’ve never been disappointed by Stephen Ambrose, and this book is par for the course.  Start your older kids with this one for a good overall primer.