Dead or Alive

 

Dead or Alive by Tom Clancy with Grant Blackwood

Tom Clancy novels were everywhere during the 1990s.  No one could tell a yarn about the real world of politics, espionage, and the inner workings of international terrorism better than Clancy.  Many argued that he simply had to be a Washington insider.  How could someone be able to know things so intricately unless they were on the inside?  When one of his novels written in the late 1990s climaxed with an event very similar to what happened on 9/11 a few years later, it was downright eerie. It was ironic because it was after 9/11 that Clancy lost a bit of his steam.  This book was written in 2010 – a full seven years after the last one, and I didn’t pick it up until 11 years after that.  So my mind had some catching up to do in the memory department.

For better or worse, it didn’t take me long to become reacquainted with the recurring characters and the overall atmosphere.  Most of the important people are back: Jack Ryan, John Clark, Mary Pat Foley, Ed Foley, and Domingo Chavez among others.  I enjoyed the book overall, but I couldn’t help think that I’ve read this same book by Tom Clancy before.  Many times, in fact. The main plot here unfolds somewhat as follows:

1.       There are some really bad Mideastern Islamic terrorists that are planning an attack so huge in scope, that it will make 9/11 look like a tea party.

2.       The U.S. Government, though, has been emasculated as of late due to too many bleeding hearts and tree huggers currently in office.  The new powers-that-be insist that “such a world doesn’t exist anymore” and slash intelligence and military budgets to shreds.

3.       Our heroes on the inside who are the victims of the budget slashing “know better” and they have to work clandestinely outside the law in order to save the people of America along with generous helpings of baseball and apple pie.

I could go into more details, and there are a LOT of details, but that’s pretty much all you need to know.  In fact, Clancy seems to go a bit overboard with details.  There’s a lot of different players and actions going on.  Once we get to page 200 or so of this 950-page hardback, we’re still meeting new people that are somehow relevant to the plot. That’s an awful lot of characters to keep up with in a story.  None of this is boring or tedious, however. Clancy always does an excellent job keeping his readers interested even if he’s only providing background or history of a character.  Even when there’s an awful LOT of history and background with everyone and everything.

Example: We meet a character who’s pulling into a parking lot at a government facility.  Clancy will tell us all about the background of the facility, much of its history, how its changed for the worse, and on and on.   When our character finally gets out of the car and walks up to the security guard, Clancy will again digress into a long-winded soliloquy lasting several pages about the security guards, their history, how they’ve changed, and on and on.  Our character finally walks into the building and looks around at the lobby of the facility, and….well….you know the rest.   So there are many times when not a lot happens over a lot of pages, yet we really don’t seem to mind because Clancy really is an entertaining author.

Sometimes his hyperbole is a tad too much. We’re not supposed to like the current POTUS in the story, yet Clancy feels he has to paint his subject with all of the worst possible tendencies and idiosyncrasies you can imagine.  The President in this story has absolutely no redeeming features, and Clancy does not mince words.  Then we come to his descriptions of the terrorists, and there are several of these individuals. Now, I’m not an expert on Islam, but I would imagine a Moslem would be mightily offended by Clancy’s description of these sick individuals and their twisted misguided devotion to their faith.  We constantly read sentences such as “Allah would rejoice at the killing of the infidel….”, “Children would die, but Allah would be pleased….”, “It was Allah’s hand that would  guide him in the torture and suffering of the greedy Westerners…..”   There must have been more than 50 such descriptions in this book.  It’s a bit much.  Again, I seem to recall these sentiments from Clancy’s previous books as well.

There’s also a lot of side action here, many of it seems unnecessary and only included to pad the pages.  There was one scene dealing with a hostage rescue at a Swedish embassy in Tripoli, and another with an assassination attempt that seemed rather superfluous. There’s also a lot of unfinished story, so I’m sure the future Jack Ryan novels that were written pick up in places where this one left off.

On a bizarre fact vs. fiction note, this story talks a lot about 9/11, but I’m not sure if 9/11 ever actually “happened” in the Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan fiction world.  I’m sure this can be a challenge for an author. How does one reference real events in a fictitious story, when the story actually began before such real events occurred?   I could be wrong here, but this might be something that a detailed reader may want to remind themselves of before they open the front cover.

It really is an enjoyable, interesting read though.  The hardback is 950 pages, but they’re swift pages.  The pages aren’t too cluttered with detail, so you can move your way through the book rather quickly.  I’m sure I’ll read more of the Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan novels, and I’ll probably enjoy them overall.  If you’re looking for anything “new” though, you might be disappointed.  It’s the same old same old. But it is a pretty fun ride as long as you know what to expect.

Camino Winds

 

Camino Winds – by John Grisham

A sequel, of sorts, to John Grisham’s “Camino Island”. I wasn’t too crazy about that one, and my opinion of this one isn’t much better.  I’ve said this countless times about John Grisham: He needs to stop churning out 2-3 books per year, and instead focus only on 1 book every 2-3 years.  I guess the accountants at his publishing house think otherwise.  The story here is good overall, but it lacks anything substantial and seems to be unnecessarily padded. When you have to pad a book that’s only about 290 pages, that’s not a good sign.  Example: When we meet an individual who is extremely health conscious, we don’t need to be told exactly what she is eating every time she sits down for a meal at a restaurant. She’s a health nut. We get it John. Enough. Information like this is pretty useless unless it’s somehow related to the plot, and it never is.

Camino Island is a place where a lot of semi-successful authors live.  That alone sounds suspect.  I mean, even moderately successful authors are truly rare, and do they really all live and hang out together on an island?  Bruce Cable owns a bookstore on the island, so he serves as sort of a center for all these bizarre personalities.  I guess maybe I shouldn’t raise my eyebrows at the 70-year-old lesbian couple who writes soft porn novels, especially when Bruce himself is in an “open” marriage that nobody seems to really care about.  Maybe I live a sheltered life, but thankfully I don’t know a single person with such living arrangements. All these characters also drink alcohol like it’s going out of style.  If it’s possible to get a hangover from simply reading about people drinking, this book will certainly do it to you.

Anyway, a massive category 4 hurricane is about to hit the island. Most leave, but Bruce and a few others stay. After the storm, they discover one of their writer friends dead out in his yard.  It seems he was hit pretty hard in the head by some flying debris during the storm.  

Or did something else more sinister happen?

Well, Bruce and a couple of friends play detective and manage to uncover an awful lot in a very short amount of time.  This book, with the story better fleshed out, probably should have been about twice as long as it was.  But I guess John Grisham had a deadline, so ‘i’s get dotted and ‘t’s get crossed rather quickly. Anyway, without giving away too much of the plot, this book turns into yet another one of John Grisham’s insistent championing of the little people who find themselves at the mercy of the big bad corporate baddies.  You know, the evil people at the top who make hundreds of millions of dollars by performing activities that are highly immoral and illegal. In the meantime, the masses of minimum wage underlings at the bottom of the corporate ladder have to sweat and scrimp while being paid scale.  They can’t, you know, go look for a better job or anything because they’re always a single parent with 4 or 5 young kids. So who has time to look for another job?

Sadly, nothing really stands out in this book.  John Grisham does always manage to hold his reader’s attention, but this one was way too forced, too contrived, and an obvious attempt for him to rake in another few million or so.   I didn’t enjoy my trip back to Camino Island that much, and I really hope that we never go back there again.    Let’s hope all of the characters do the right thing and check themselves into alcoholics anonymous.  Surely Grisham wouldn’t write about that, would he?

The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

 

The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter by Kai Bird

I was too young to remember much about the Jimmy Carter presidency.  When I attended college in the late 1980s, I had a professor who sardonically commented that Carter was “the last president who ever died while in office”.  After reading this wonderful, yet somewhat sad, biography of Carter, I now know where such sarcastic sentiments come from when looking at the ill-fated one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Although one could argue that this book is in fact a biography, the vast majority of the book focuses on the four years of 1977-1980.  Author Kai Bird does give us a little bit of Carter’s youth and upbringing, but does so sparingly. This section seems to be included only to emphasize the fact that the deep south was highly racist during Jimmy Carter’s youth, and the only person south of the Mason-Dixon line who was NOT a racist, was Carter himself.  At least that was the feeling one gets while reading this. 

We then make great leaps from Carter the youth to Carter the soldier to Carter the local politician to Carter the governor of Georgia in only a few pages.  In fact, once Carter becomes governor, this book doesn’t really tell us anything he did during his tenure, other than use it as a steppingstone to the White House. There’s not really a whole lot here about the campaign during 1976 either.  It seems like the author is simply trying to quickly get to the presidency since that is where he wants to put the majority of his focus.  I don’t really mean this as a criticism, merely an observation.  I’ll just warn you that if you’re wanting a deep dive into Jimmy Carter before he became president, I’m not sure this book will scratch your itch.  In fact, AFTER the presidency, there’s only one measly chapter dealing with Carter’s life from 1980 to the present.  So doing the math shows you that you get about twenty pages of book detailing forty-plus years of the man’s life.

So this book is really devoted to Carter as President of the U.S.A.  The book is incredibly interesting and captivating.  Sometimes books about political figures draw you too deep into the weeds and bore the helpless reader.  I felt this way at times when I read Stu Eizenstat’s (Carter’s Domestic Affairs Advisor) book on The Carter administration, which included an entire 77-page chapter on stagflation. Oy. This isn’t the case with Kai Bird’s account.  This book moves swiftly from event to event and each chapter is told in the exact amount of detail that is required.  Obviously, such chapters that deal with the Camp David Accord and the Iranian hostage crisis go into far more detail, but it’s all necessary and never boring.  In fact, there were times when I would be so enraptured when reading about the politics of Iran before the Shah was deposed, I forgot that I was actually reading a book about a presidency and not the event itself. When a chapter such as this ended, I felt rocked and jarred upon arriving at the next chapter.  I simply didn’t want the former narrative to end.

Kai Bird’s underlying theme here is that Jimmy Carter was ahead of his time.  Carter had great initiatives (human rights, energy conservation, environmentalism, etc.), but they weren’t really at the forefront of most voters minds back in the 1970s.  The author focuses on this at the beginning, and at the end, of this book.  He definitely is an apologist for Carter and is obviously a fan.  Fortunately, though, this opinion isn’t tainted throughout the whole narrative.  He doesn’t make excuses for Carter’s gaffes as president, and there were sadly tons.  The main theme here is that Carter was (and is) a great human being, but he simply wasn’t that great of a president. In fact, we come to the conclusion that the only reason a man like Jimmy Carter could get elected president, was because the country was in more turmoil than it had ever been due to Watergate.  Voters were so sick of politics as usual, that they were very eager to welcome an unheard of, fresh, smiling face into the office; even if he was a peanut farmer from the deep south.  It couldn’t be worse than what they had gone through during the last four years. Could it?

Well, here is where we see the warts of Carter.  The man simply doesn’t understand politics and/or how to get things done in Washington.  He inherits a legislative branch that is highly tilted in the Democratic party’s favor, yet Carter seems to alienate his own base far more often than the minority party on the other side.  We constantly read about conflicts with Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, and a host of other liberal democrats.  Even Ed Koch, the Democratic mayor of New York City, can’t stand him. Carter, it seems, simply doesn’t want to play their politics game. He also manages to alienate the high-profile Washington press corps by avoiding silly things such as cocktail parties and refusing dinner invitations.  He made a lot of enemies in Washington awfully quick.  If you want to be successful in Washington, you just can’t do these things.

We then must admit that he wasn’t a terribly exciting leader.  Whenever Carter gave a speech or appeared on television, he always looked and sounded like a cat suffering from indigestion after eating a sour mouse.  It seems like the man could never catch a break.  We read about how he disappeared to Camp David for about ten days with no explanation as to why (presidents really aren’t supposed to do this), and when he comes back, delivers his infamous “malaise” speech, and then fires roughly half of his cabinet.  And on and on and on.

When it comes time for the 1980 presidential race, all I could think of was “Why on this Earth would this man WANT to run again after all he’s been through??”.  So this is overall a sad account, yet incredibly truthful.   It says an awful lot when an author such as Kai Bird who honestly thinks highly of his subject matter, is brutally honest when revealing his subject’s multitude of shortcomings.

I loved this book.  This was about 630 pages of reading material (not including sources, indices, etc.), yet I gobbled it up in less than a week.  It greatly held my attention and I learned an awful lot about this particular time of history.  In fact, there’s so much more I want to say about this book, but my review that I’m writing is already rather long.  So I’ll conclude by saying: read this book.  If you love history, you’ll love it.