“For more than half a century, there [was] no manned presence on the lunar surface. That was about to change …”
One of my fondest and most vivid read“For more than half a century, there [was] no manned presence on the lunar surface. That was about to change …”
One of my fondest and most vivid reading memories is my first reading of Tom Clancy’s THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, arguably English literature’s first techno-thriller. I recall holding my breath, eyes wide and eyebrows raised, and swallowing deeply as defecting Soviet submarine Captain Marko Ramius played a deadly silent game of hide and seek in the mountainous undersea terrain of the Reykjanes Ridge off the coast of Iceland. EAGLE STATION riffs on the same themes by moving that international chess match into the air, into space, and onto the surface of the moon, as a Sino-Soviet alliance wages covert (and officially undeclared but very, very hot) warfare (with extreme prejudice) against the USA over control of the lunar surface and the mining of the moon’s helium-3 resources.
There is no shortage of brilliantly exploited, fast-paced themes here to thrill even the most hard-core technology, political, and military junkies – hard-nosed international diplomacy; deployment of the recently created US Space Force; hard-core military tit for tat that treads ever closer to the boundary of a declared world war; high speed aerial battles; advances in weaponry that would make your head spin; and, of course, government decision making under the stress of all of these conditions.
EAGLE STATION is a snap to recommend to fellow readers and the latest nominee for my Top Ten of 2024 reading list.
On a side note as we rapidly approach the fateful November day on which the US will decide whether its future will include democracy and the rule of law, I shuddered when I tried to imagine a certain Donald J Trump in place of EAGLE STATION’s president, John Dalton Farrell. The possible results for the world as I pictured Trump making decisions in the same scenarios were simply terrifying. Food for thought … !
“On a stone hearth in the centre, a fire of yak dung burned brightly and an old Tibetan woman was crumbling brick tea into a cauldron of boiling wa“On a stone hearth in the centre, a fire of yak dung burned brightly and an old Tibetan woman was crumbling brick tea into a cauldron of boiling water.”
Jack Drummond, an involuntary retiree from the British Navy, now makes his living as a mercenary gun-runner, a smuggler to order if you will, following the money he needs to live and prepare a dubious retirement. One last mission is in the cards delivering weapons to Tibetan guerillas in their hot/cold struggle against the Chinese Communists. But that idea goes down in literal flames when his plane, such as it is, is destroyed and Drummond is left with no choice but to help the local head man deliver his ailing son safely across land to the Indian border. The Chinese, including a treacherous turncoat double agent, see the child as a potential symbol that they can groom and use to secure their hold over the area. And it’s clear they’ll take whatever desperate measures are necessary to stop Drummond from delivering the child to safety.
THE IRON TIGER is an interesting, credible, and fast-moving adventure tale that entertains but, frankly, suffers somewhat by comparison to Higgins’ more popular novels such as THE EAGLE HAS LANDED. That said, Higgins is to be commended for providing a progressive female romantic interest in the novel with skills, backbone, some strength, and the determination to set her own path. Well done.
Recommended as an entertaining example of the quasi-military adventure novel typical of the mid 20th century.
“If you are interested in reading a story filled with thrillingly good times, I am sorry to inform you that you are most certainly reading the wron“If you are interested in reading a story filled with thrillingly good times, I am sorry to inform you that you are most certainly reading the wrong book”
Count Olaf’s nefarious plans for a marriage with Violet Baudelaire and the theft of the children’s inherited wealth were foiled in A BAD BEGINNING and THE REPTILE ROOM, BOOK THE SECOND. Mr Poe remains blind and hopelessly insensitive to the children’s danger and Count Olaf proves that, while he was down, he most certainly isn’t out. He continues to lust for the children’s bankroll. The children’s hopes for a safe and comfortable life with an elderly aunt who is a relentlessly pedantic grammar Nazi aunt terrified of everything from doorknobs to telephones are, of course, dashed on the rocks of continuing “unfortunate events” including, for goodness’ sake, being handed over to the “guardianship” of the Count.
Snicket’s unique, dare I say bizarre, stylistic hook, the interminable offerings of doom and gloom to a most delightful family of children continues to work and exudes a very puzzling kind of charm. The children’s love for one another and their endearing ability to squirm their way through the tiniest of holes and the tightest of fixes is quite heartwarming.
A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS is definitely recommended for both children and for young at heart adult readers who enjoy dipping their toes into lighter fare from to time. On an even more positive note, I will commend Snicket’s writing style as being very “grown-up” in tone, never patronizing or condescending to young readers for even a microsecond and, in the bargain, quite educational and useful for building a young person’s vocabulary of more “adult” words.
“We realize that we know next to nothing about the Anasazi”
“After three decades of mysterious and inexplicable discoveries … we don’t understand their“We realize that we know next to nothing about the Anasazi”
“After three decades of mysterious and inexplicable discoveries … we don’t understand their culture, we don’t understand their religion. We cannot read their petroglyphs and pictographs. We do not know what languages they might have spoken. We do not know why they covered the Southwest wit lighthouses, shrines, roads, and signaling stations.”
Nora Kelly is a dedicated young archeologist figuratively following in her father’s footsteps trying to uncover the answers to the host of questions about the Anasazi, an enigmatic southwest US aboriginal culture. When she receives a letter from her father, long thought to be dead, that hints at the existence of Quivira, a mythical Anasazi city, the El Dorado and the Rosetta Stone of their culture as it were, she rapidly puts together an expedition into the difficult, isolated heart of Utah’s wilderness canyon country. With the help of the puzzling instructions contained in that letter, Nora now sets out in search of her father’s literal footsteps to find Quivira, an unprecedented archeological achievement that would completely eclipse the likes of Howard Carter’s celebrated discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.
But someone (or something) does not want her to succeed and it seems they are willing to go so far as gruesome ritualistic murder to stop her. And there seems to be reason to believe that those who would stop them are “the spotted-clay witches, the skinwalkers, the wolfskin runners”.
THUNDERHEAD is 10% horror and supernatural, 30% extended informative, educational, and spectacularly interesting essay on the search for the history of the Anasazi and the minutiae of archeological techniques and research, 50% high speed suspense thriller with spills, chills, twists, and turns, and, last but not least, 10% reserved for the requisite inclusion of a little boy-girl action and romance. Oh, and did I say that it’s a 100% enjoyable addition to the Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child canon and a great start to the new Nora Kelly series. Between Nora Kelly and the re-appearance of New York Times journalist Bill Smithback of Aloysius Pendergast RELIC fame, the series promises to be thoroughly entertaining. I’m definitely looking forward to the next entry, OLD BONES.
The back-cover marketing blurb seemed to hold promise ... a geologist adventurer likened to a combination of Dirk Pitt I wanted to like it ... really!
The back-cover marketing blurb seemed to hold promise ... a geologist adventurer likened to a combination of Dirk Pitt and James Bond. Sounds good so far! But then came the science and my credibility meter slammed so hard into the red zone that the needle snapped off when it hit the stop at the top end. At 140 pages, my eyes had rolled into the back of my head and I closed the novel with disgust and a distinct sigh of resignation. If Jack Du Brul had submitted his manuscript as a sci-fi novel instead of an adventure thriller, the publishers would have laughed him out of the building and sent him packing.
“A classic adventure story of single-minded obsession”
Shoalt’s luscious but chilling opening paragraph of the prologue will give an adventurous, o“A classic adventure story of single-minded obsession”
Shoalt’s luscious but chilling opening paragraph of the prologue will give an adventurous, outdoor-minded (and jealous, if I may say so) reader an excellent idea of the treats in store in ALONE AGAINST THE NORTH:
“Ahead of us lay the pitiless expanse of frigid ocean known as Hudson Bay. Behind us lay countless miles of windswept tundra, trackless swamp, and impassable muskeg. Half-famished polar bears roamed the desolate coastline. It wasn’t a place one should travel alone – or at all, really.”
ALONE AGAINST THE NORTH is a gripping story that discloses the heart, the mind, the obsession, the adventures, the exploits, the skills, the determination, the courage, and the achievements of a single-minded explorer determined to chart the length of an unknown river in the James Bay lowlands of Arctic Canada. The Again River was a route which might have been traveled on extremely rare occasions at some point in Canada’s past but that had never been documented or mapped in any way. It was also a river that would mercilessly eat up a canoeist with the temerity to attempt to do so who made so much as the slightest error in judgment.
As an experienced (and, I dare say, somewhat accomplished) outdoorsman, hiker, canoeist and camper in all four seasons, I can attest to the awesome difficulty of Shoalts’ achievements on this first-time descent of a terrifying river. Part biography, part adventure story, part environmental diatribe, and part natural science essay, ALONE AGAINST THE NORTH is all a page-turning and completely compelling story. Congratulations to Adam Shoalts on the outcome and the completion of a book that is easy to heartily recommend to both experienced and wannabe outdoor adventure lovers.
An awesome dramatic tale of the clash of three cultures – white colonial government, Roman Catholic arrogance, and stone age Coppermine Inuit!
In 1913,An awesome dramatic tale of the clash of three cultures – white colonial government, Roman Catholic arrogance, and stone age Coppermine Inuit!
In 1913, two Roman Catholic priests, driven by the unseemly presumption of the supremacy of their religious beliefs and its demand that all on the planet must subscribe to that religion to reach salvation, depart from the northern outpost community of Fort Norman with the goal of establishing the first church on the Coronation Gulf at the mouth of the Coppermine River.
“There were rumors they were violent savages, witches and cannibals, but to the Bishop they were the children of God yet to be claimed.”
When two years pass by without word from the priests, Royal North West Mounted Police officer Jack Creed and a young Inuit interpreter, Angituk McAndrew, are sent north to investigate and determine their fate. COPPERMINE is the extraordinary story of the discovery of the priests’ mutilated remains, the investigation of their deaths, the apprehension and arrest of their murderers, and the perilous return to Edmonton where the two Inuit will face trial for murder. The likely outcome of their conviction under white justice – a system that they had never before encountered and of which they had absolutely no understanding – is execution.
There are many words which can be used to describe COPPERMINE and every last one of them must be ranked as a superlative in its use – gripping, compelling, heartwarming, heartbreaking, informative, disgusting, brilliant, turbulent, romantic, swashbuckling, dramatic, and many, many more. It is certainly one of the very best books that I’ve read this year and ranks very highly on my list of lifetime favourites. What a find!!
But it is so much more than “merely” exciting!
It is a sociological and anthropological study of the endemic xenophobia and racism that informed the Canadian government’s mistreatment of our aboriginal people through the entire 20th century. Sadly, the struggle to improve that relationship persists into the 21st century.
“Their world is now our world, and they better damn well adapt to it just like the Indians have and like all the Aboriginals have in all the territories of the Empire. We made them … The civilizing process is what the Empire does. It is the price Natives have to pay for peace, prosperity, and security … ‘Tolerance and respect’ gets you nowhere. They must be shown the new order. They must be taught who’s boss!”
COPPERMINE is also an exposition on the mythological and cultural underpinnings of the Inuit’s “religious” beliefs and a condemnation of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches’ efforts to supplant, suppress and eliminate those beliefs entirely – only recently accepted by the Canadian government as attempted cultural genocide:
“But heaven? No. the afterlife for us is not a good place. We do not like to think about it. We think about surviving each day. Our beliefs are about life now, while your religion seems to be about death and what comes after. I’ve never understood that.”
“When we kill animals, we must do so with respect … you must avoid needless pain. We believe the spirit of the animal we kill goes into the next animal we hunt. We will meet him again, so we must treat him with respect and maybe he will give himself to us again … And when a boy makes his first kill, his mother will weep over the animal and apologize to it for what her son has done.”
“Despite himself, there were cracks forming in Creed’s skepticism about the Copper beliefs. Here on the land they made as much sense as the tenets of any religion he knew. More than most.”
(Amen to that from an atheist reader whose opinion of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions could hardly be any lower!)
Author Keith Ross Leckie’s closing comment in an afterword interview is worth repeating:
“Our task as creators is to make these stories relevant to this generation and the issues it faces. In COPPERMINE, I deal with issues such as the futility of war, new approaches to the environment, religious fundamentalism, and even gender shifting. These are contemporary, universal topics that make COPPERMINE relevant to a modern audience.”
If you have any hope that current global government efforts to improve national relationships with local aboriginal populations will succeed, then you need to read COPPERMINE. Recommended well beyond 5-stars. Reading it was an unexpected honour and privilege.
There's literary licence and there's total lack of credibility!
See what YOU think of this excerpt on a car chasing a freight train:
"The second the cabThere's literary licence and there's total lack of credibility!
See what YOU think of this excerpt on a car chasing a freight train:
"The second the caboose passed by, Bell gunned the Wolf's motor and drove it out of the thicket, up the gravel embankment, and onto the tracks. He fought his right-side tires over the nearest rail and opened the throttle. The Wolf tore after the train, bouncing hard on its ties. At nearly forty miles an hour, it bucked violently and swayed from side to side. Rubber squealed against steel, as the tires slammed against the rails. Bell halved the distanced between him and the train. Halved it again, until he was only ten feet behind the train. Now he saw that he could not jump onto the caboose without pulling alongside the train. He slewed the car back oer the rail and steered on the edge of the embankment, which was steep and narrow and studded with telegraph poles.
He had to pull alongside the caboose, grab one of its side ladders, and jump before the race car lost speed and fell back. He overtook the train, steered alongside it. A car length ahead, he saw a telegraph pole that was set closer than the others to the rail. There was no room to squeeze between it and the train.
Bell gunned the engine, seized the caboose's ladder in his right hand, and jumped.
His fingers slipped on the cold steel rung. He heard the Packard Wolf crash into the telegraph pole behind him. Swinging wildly from one arm, he glimpsed the Wolf tumbling down the embankment and fought with all his strength to avoid the same fate. But his arm felt as if it had been ripped out ofhis shoulder. The pain tore down his arm like fre. Hard as he tried to hold on, he could not stop his fingers from splaying open.
He fell. As his boots hit the ballast, he caught the bottom rung of the ladder with his left hand. His boots dragged on the stones, threatening his precarious grip. Then he got both hands on the ladder, tucked his legs up in a tight ball, and hauled himself up, climbing hand over hand, until he could plant a boot on the rung and swing onto the rear platform of the caboose."
ARE YOU KIDDING ME???
Do I really look that stupid to you, Mr Cussler? Sad to say, I was enjoying the story up until that point but when you insult my intelligence and credibility to THAT extent, all bets are off. This book is relegated to my DNF list and is headed for the local Little Free Library box. Maybe somebody else is more willing to accept that kind of nonsense than I am!
Author McCulloch learned to “be bothered” on Mount Toukbal in Morocco
Cecily Wong is an experienced but currently struggling journalist. She’s also a lAuthor McCulloch learned to “be bothered” on Mount Toukbal in Morocco
Cecily Wong is an experienced but currently struggling journalist. She’s also a less than accomplished climber with only minimal experience but somehow she has landed the assignment of a lifetime. She is to accompany Charles McVeigh, world-renowned outdoorsman and alpinist extraordinaire who is on a mission to climb all 14 of the world’s 8000 meter peaks the hard way – self-guided, no oxygen, no help, no fixed ropes. If Wong summits Manaslu with McVeigh, the final peak in his challenge, and returns, her reward will be an interview and full coverage of an unbeatable adventure and outdoor journalism scoop.
Climbing at this level is its own challenge and the risk of death or serious injury is ever present but Cecily is accused of paranoia and a dangerous lack of focus when she expresses the belief that someone is stalking their team and providing the metaphorical (or real) push over the cliff to meet the grim reaper.
If BREATHLESS were a non-fiction recounting of a real-life Manaslu climb, I would be singing its praises from here to Nepal and back. McCulloch clearly has a solid grasp of the realities of climbing logistics, inter-personal dynamics, mountain politics, unpredictable weather, equipment, the medical considerations of altitude and oxygen deprivation, and much, much more. Her technical explanations of the near-military precision required to successfully complete such an undertaking are much more than merely interesting. They are gripping, informative, precise, awe-inspiring, and quite terrifying. Comparisons to mountain blockbusters such as INTO THIN AIR would be perfectly warranted and reasonable.
But I struggled to describe my unimpressed reaction to McCulloch’s efforts to turn the Manaslu climb into a suspense thriller and a murder mystery. I think that I’ve put my finger on the problem, at least as I saw it. The murder scenario and the murderer’s motivations were way, way over the top (to stretch the climbing metaphor, LOL!) and the villain was actually vaudevillian – a Snidley Whiplash type who gloated over his victims as he twirled his mustache!
I enjoyed it but the enjoyment was marginal. If McCulloch writes another thriller in the context of outdoor adventure, I’ll give it a try to see if she manages to achieve higher marks in the credibility department.
As nothing has fundamentally changed my opinion, it's worth repeating the entire review that I prepared for A series going downhill on a shallow slope
As nothing has fundamentally changed my opinion, it's worth repeating the entire review that I prepared for THE RUNAWAY KING.
In THE FALSE PRINCE, the opening novel in THE ASCENDANCE TRILOGY, Jaron Eckbert was characterized as a raffish, picaresque, young rogue with an attitude and a comical mouth that often wrote cheques coming disastrously close to being dishonored. But for all that, he was both loving and lovable and there couldn’t possibly have been a reader who wasn’t rooting for him to set aside his disguise as an impoverished orphan, to adopt his true identity, and to claim the throne of Carthya as its rightful king. In THE RUNAWAY KING, as Jaron assumes that rightful identity and expects to be crowned the king, he now faces stern opposition - a council of regents unwilling to accept the coronation of such a youthful king. Indeed, he even has to survive an assassination attempt.
Unfortunately as the story unfolds, Jaron’s hopelessly optimistic and apparently unrealistic, unexpected, and often opposed decision-making ( for the affected adults around him and, I dare say, for an adult reader) become simply unreasonable and irritating. It seems even more grating when Nielsen allows the outcomes to get steadily luckier and to constantly justify Jaron’s decisions. As a predictable result, the story simply becomes less and less credible. On the plus side, there are outstanding moments of convincing and heart-warming personal growth, friendship, loyalty and emotion that preserve THE RUNAWAY KING’s status as a 3- or 4- star story for an adult reader. So it seems sensible to err on the higher side of that rating given that the intended audience is young adult.
Given that the credibility factor in THE SHADOW THRONE is stretched even more tightly as Jaron, on occasion, presumes to stand alone in the face of entire armies AND that one particular event in a battle seems like a flat-out snitch from a scene in A GAME OF THRONES, I'd lower my rating as an adult reader to no more than 2 stars. But, once again, given that the audience is middle grade young adult readers, I'll allow it to stretch to a begrudging 3-stars.
In THE FALSE PRINCE, the opening novel in THE ASCENDANCE TRILOGY, Jaron Eckbert was characterized as a raffiA series going downhill on a shallow slope
In THE FALSE PRINCE, the opening novel in THE ASCENDANCE TRILOGY, Jaron Eckbert was characterized as a raffish, picaresque, young rogue with an attitude and a comical mouth that often wrote cheques coming disastrously close to being dishonored. But for all that, he was both loving and lovable and there couldn’t possibly have been a reader who wasn’t rooting for him to set aside his disguise as an impoverished orphan, to adopt his true identity, and to claim the throne of Carthya as its rightful king. In THE RUNAWAY KING, as Jaron assumes that rightful identity and expects to be crowned the king, he now faces stern opposition - a council of regents unwilling to accept the coronation of such a youthful king. Indeed, he even has to survive an assassination attempt.
Unfortunately as the story unfolds, Jaron’s hopelessly optimistic and apparently unrealistic, unexpected, and often opposed decision-making ( for the affected adults around him and, I dare say, for an adult reader) become simply unreasonable and irritating. It seems even more grating when Nielsen allows the outcomes to get steadily luckier and to constantly justify Jaron’s decisions. As a predictable result, the story simply becomes less and less credible. On the plus side, there are outstanding moments of convincing and heart-warming personal growth, friendship, loyalty and emotion that preserve THE RUNAWAY KING’s status as a 3- or 4- star story for an adult reader. So it seems sensible to err on the higher side of that rating given that the intended audience is young adult.
"An intriguing tale of a strange expedition to Greenland" ...
… that’s an interesting blend of mid-20th century pulp style romantic adventure with "An intriguing tale of a strange expedition to Greenland" ...
… that’s an interesting blend of mid-20th century pulp style romantic adventure with a soupçon of imagined fantasy via dream sequences. (You just gotta love that cover art!!)
The story is summarized simply enough. David Lockwood, an accomplished university-based archeologist in England, needs an experienced seaplane pilot to conduct some aerial photography surveys to confirm some of his ideas concerning historical human habitation in Greenland. Donald Ross, a pilot who earned his experience in the Canadian arctic, fits the bill. Difficulties arise when Lockwood’s thoroughly spoiled and outrageously opinionated brat daughter insists on accompanying them to Greenland out of concern that her father’s age and health may not permit him to safely mount such an expedition on his own.
Given Nevil Shute’s fame with such runaway successes as ON THE BEACH and A TOWN CALLED ALICE, the quality of the story, the gripping nature of the adventure, the informative narration of the technical difficulties of flying in north Atlantic and Arctic conditions, and, of course, the ensuing romance, are all entirely predictable and nothing less than expected. Prospective readers need only be cautioned to hold the expectations that might arise from the previous experience with Shute’s novels in check. While a quick and enjoyable read, AN OLD CAPTIVITY is definitely less than memorable and is a distant weak sister compared to the other two powerhouse novels I mentioned.
Recommended for those who like to read less famous stories by top-shelf authors.
A passable graphic adaptation of a stellar classic, young-adult, adventure novel. A minor criticism ... sometimes"YO, HO, HO and a bottle of rum!"
A passable graphic adaptation of a stellar classic, young-adult, adventure novel. A minor criticism ... sometimes the flow of panels crosses two open pages and sometimes it doesn't. On any given page, it's tough to know which way the artist chose to go. The suggestion, of course, is to pick one and stick with it!
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