This book certainly has a distinctive voice. It is the voice of a know-it-all who won't shut up even though you stopped buying him beers two hours ago. In this book he tells the army how they should be doing things, the middle east how they should be governed (while shooting quite a few of them), a new farm wife what to cook her farmer husband for breakfast, and finishes with an interminable, oops, stirring, speech telling every citizen of the US how to be a proper citizen. No need for personal liberty when you have John Ringo, oops, Bandit Six, to tell you the right way to think.

A wankfest for people with a John Wayne fantasy.


( )

This is a novel about a plague and climate change hitting in 2019-2020 written back in 2008, from the perspective of an infantry captain in the U.S. Army. This is a flawed book but still great. Probably the best post-apocalyptic near-term book I've read. Strangely prescient in some ways, strangely flawed in other ways -- a few things were exactly backwards, possibly due to changes in the world between 2008 and today.

It doesn't fall into the weird right-wing novel trap of being a manual for revolution (with lots of detailed instructions, product placements, out of place monologues about philosophy, etc. There's some of that, but it's in-context and appropriate.

Book was written in 2006-2008. There's an obvious Hillary Clinton character as President in 2016-2020. The irony is most of the negative things ascribed to her turned out to be bipartisan (Trump did them as well, and some were Obama-type actions); you could have had the same novel with only insignificant changes written as a left-wing post apocalyptic novel. I guess there are universal forms of bad governance.

There were a lot of really unbelievable situations in the book which were somehow explained and made plausible through the story through other implausible situations, but it was consistently entertaining.

A fair number of technical errors throughout the book -- the author had some military background but only up to E-4, and didn't have really extensive personal knowledge of the geography of the areas involved in the novel, but it was still entertaining. ( )

A tough slog in some places but an interesting read none the less. As a preemptive right wing strike; should the US ever elect a liberal female president, it opens will a definite and quite detailed analysis of how a pandemic spreads. Then, transitions to a lost company in Iran captained by no ordinary mortal. Refuting current thinking on global warming with a well reasoned counter theory, he makes the case for industrial level agriculture as the way to feed the world. Then, he resolves most of the historic Mideast problems on his way to capture Istanbul assisted by some Nepalese turned into instant Gurkhas and the usual bevy of beautiful women. ( )

Another good alternate history. This one on Earth, in our time. We can only hope that the armed forces have people like this in them. A no-nonsense look at a possible result of current policies. ( )

Great! -- Reads like a cross between Heinlein and Clancy! Definitely a keeper