Reader’s Diary

I’ve been remodeling. In addition to the book cover images, you’ll find a set of “get the book” links after each review.

David Poyer

It’s remarkable for any series, especially one from the ranks of genre military thrillers, to maintain its originality. Too often the author of this type of book paints himself into a corner like Tom Clancy, who has gone so far into his alternate history that he may never emerge, or becomes a Rush Limbaugh style ranter like Dan Brown. Happily Poyer’s “Tales of the Modern Navy” (AKA the Dan Lenson series) continues to deliver character development and human interest along with the action.

Poyer’s latest follows “The Command“. Lenson has taken a White House job and is being set up as the Oswald in an assassination plot. The intended target is an anti-military philandering liberal president. In the military thriller genre, such a character normally plays the role of villain. This convention is turned upside down in “The Threat” but to go on would spoil the plot so I’ll say no more except to quote these pointed lines from the novel:

He thought of what Washington, and America, had been when he was young, and of how much had changed. From protest to conformity. From openness to secrecy. From confidence to carefully inculcated fear.

Sometimes he thought the dream of democracy might be ending. As it had for Rome long before. Bringing a new imperial age. Dictatorship. Slavery. And unending war.

If the choice was empire, then the threat was clear. The threat would be America herself - her power, her violence, her blind, crusading arrogance.

Lloyd Clark

This is the dramatic, well-told story of a campaign that’s been overshadowed by the Normandy invasion. It strikes a good balance between the personal and the strategic, mixing accounts of small unit actions and soldiers’ experiences with clear explanations of high-level command decisions. Clark argues that it was Churchill’s obsessive insistence on attempting to outflank the Nazi forces in Italy by sea (reminiscent of this disastrous Gallipoli operation) that lead to the near-disaster of the Anzio campaign. He vindicates U.S. General Lucas’ cautious measured build up and criticizes General Mark Clark’s focus on the meaningless objective of Rome, a focus that allowed much of the German Tenth Army to escape.

Richard Pike Bissell

This is a great but little-known novel first published in 1950. Set in 1943, it’s the semi-autobiographical story of a young man from a prosperous family who becomes a deckhand on an Upper Mississippi tow boat. It’s a road novel, more focused on character and setting than on plot. Bissell captures the boatmen - particularly the rhythms or their speech, evokes the river, and vividly portrays the river towns of that bygone era.

(Scott P. Cook’s appreciation of “A Stretch on the River” contains more background on its author and extensive quotes from the novel.)

Peter Feuerherd

This book is interesting but it doesn’t live up to its subtitle. It’s hardly a “ride through America’s evangelical landscape”. It’s mostly profiles of the author’s acquaintances and personal anecdotes rather than the diary of a road trip. Feuerherd is an experienced religion reporter but his book is short and disjointed. To his credit, he avoids the easy approach of focusing on the evangelical fringe. He tries to make evangelicals seem, to Catholics, less annoying while demonstrating convincingly that “evangelical” is not a necessarily a synonym for “political conservative”. The book is kind to its subjects: there’s more of Flanders then of Falwell here.

Lewis Buzbee

This is a nice little memoir about the author’s experience as a retail bookseller and publisher’s representative. It’s also a history of book selling. Surprisingly, Buzbee isn’t terribly upset about chain stores: even a Barnes & Noble is still, after all, a bookstore. He’s more concerned that massive “big box” stores like Costco will come to dominate book selling and obliterate bookstores in the process.