Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Reading (E-Reader) - "Against All Enemies" - Tom Clancy & Peter Telep

I'm a big Tom Clancy fan, at least for his mainstream Jack Ryan and assorted books - haven't read much of his other series ("Power Plays"...).

I started reading "Against All Enemies" two days ago and will likely finish tonight.  As with all Clancy novels, I really get into them and read them voraciously.

This one is mediocre, unfortunately.  The plot (a link between Mexican drug cartels and mid-east terrorists) is promising, but the story lacks some drama.  There certainly are enough "gun-play" scenes where the bullet missed high, low or to one side... and they killed off many "good guys", which is unusual.  However, unless the last 10% of the book changes the tone, the book lacked a defining moral, and does tend toward simplifying and stereotyping muslim characters.

Clancy is capable of much greater things.  Terrorism is based upon a lot of causes - poverty, lack of education, inter-generational grievances, politics,  religion, perceived lack of alternatives, alienation, and a large number of "nothing to lose" young males to convince to do "God's work". Clancy did a much better job on expressing the motivations and ambivalence among the senior drug-cartel folks (lack of options, corruption of government and police, pervasive influence of drug cartels into all aspects of life, unemployment), to avoid the simple "evil" label - this helped to make a case for policies of using one cartel vs another to kill the perceived greater problem and how hydra-like the solutions become (killing one cartel just empowers another).

It didn't seem like the same process was applied to the mid-eastern terrorists, though the same (or greater) complexities can certainly make for an excellent read, and illustrate why a "white hat - black hat" strategy is not necessarily a winning strategy, even if it plays well at home.

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