I can’t recommend this book highly enough. A personal view of the Iraq conflict from before the US moved in up until the first elections over the course of approximately a dozen visits.
Hughes is a journalist, at the time working for the Daily Mirror, which got him access to a lot of places many people couldn’t (or wouldn’t) go. The book really gives you an insight into the work of a journalist and the newspaper industry as well as Hughes’ own views and opinions on the conflict itself.
It is a very easy read, well paced and with virtually no fluff or padding. It’s rare for me to go right through a book without skimming occasionally, and I read every single word of Road Trip To Hell (enough so to spot the three typographical errors).
What happened, and is continuing to happen, in Iraq is very important – to the people there and to the rest of the world. Road Trip to Hell is highly recommended as a way to balance the tabloid press and governmental viewpoints.
WARNING – one or two of the photos included are rather graphic. Don’t leave it lying around where youngsters could flick through.
Not bad to start with, but gets incredibly waffly as it goes. Brown’s characters’ dialogue is better than some previous novels, but still stilted and unnatural in places.
The pace is great up until around half way when the chapters suddenly double in length and all the excitement seems to leave the story. Quick action gives way to long, boring philosophical arguments and the final “reveal” of the secret being searched for is incredibly underwhelming.
Also – page 578 – a progress bar and a task bar are different things. You’d think a guy who wrote a novel about the computer systems being used within the NSA would know this. Actually, remembering how poor that book was, perhaps not.
It still surprised me that Dan Brown is given so much credit for this genre of novel when he wasn’t the first to write one, and when his are certainly not amongst the best. I guess he has a good publicity department.
Once upon a time I was lucky enough to receive a quick email from Stephen Leather when I popped a review of Long Shot on my blog. It was from a cybercafe in Thailand or somewhere so I couldn’t reply him. Shame.
Leather has consistently written good thrillers including The Chinaman, one of his first and still one of my favourites of all time. This is the 7th Spider Shepherd novel and I *think* I’ve read them all to date. I’m not sure, which is one of the reasons I joined GoodReads! I need to keep track…
Rough Justice is very much a crime thriller of modern times. Spider is drafted in to try and discover which corrupt policemen in a special unit attached to the Met happen to be taking the law into their own hands – castrating rapists, shooting gangbangers, hanging paedophiles and the like.
As Spider infiltrates the group, he also has personal issues at home with his son threatened and his old army Major looking for his own form of revenge when his nephew is murdered.
As such, the book throws up the same question from three viewpoints – when it justice just? And how far should you go? Is it OK when it’s your family to step over the line? Or a close friend? Or when it’s society that’s taking the brunt of a poor justice system?
This is definitely the best Shepherd novel and one of Leather’s best overall. Highly recommended for pace and delivery. I particularly like the way that little nuggets of well-researched trivia are dropped into the text and dialogue in a way that won’t patronise the reader.
Great stuff. I have at least one more Leather in my “to-read” pile and I’m looking forward to it.
I don’t normally do book reviews, but a) ZZ9 Â can pinch this for the next issue of MH and b) Mr Gill kindly messages me via Twitter and I kind of mentioned I’d write one.
42 Douglas Adams’ Amazingly Accurate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything by Peter Gill
This could easily just have been a book full of random news snippets and dodgy maths, but Gill manages to make it a little more than that. Chapters throughout attempt to group the 42’s together by theme and there’s a fair bit at the end filled with Adams’ own reasons for choosing the famous number.
Being the 42 geek I am I was impressed with the number of references I wasn’t previously aware of. What I wasn’t so keen on was that quite a few were rather tenuous. There are a couple of “just over 42″s and the like which break the rules! Gill also introduces a couple of sections based on pushing the number 42 into a given situation, the main example is his idea for an alternative decibel system based on units of 42.
The idea of 42-ana (I just made that up) is that you look for the presence of 42 in other things – not shoehorn it into places where it doesn’t already exist. That’s just an excuse to list something else which has nowt to do with the subject at hand.
Despite this complaint, I quite enjoyed the book. Even when this tactic is used the subject matter is usually interesting enough to be worth reading regardless, but I am a lover of all things trivial. It’s not a book for everyone, not even for every Douglas Adams fan, but it’s good bedside or bogside fodder.
I hope that doesn’t come across as an insult to the author!
I managed to finish a book. This is amazing these days. I used to plough through maybe 4-6 novels a week when I was at school. These days I’m nearer one a month, which is hugely disappointing to me.
Anyway, courtesy of the lovely people from ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha (the official Douglas Adams fan club), I won a copy of the sixth book in the trilogy. For those who don’t know, it’s actually written by Eoin Colfer, better known for his children’s books. This is predominantly to do with the fact that Adams died in 2001, making it even more difficult for his publishers to get a sequel out of him than was normally the case.
I would have bought a copy (I own a stupid number of copies of the original Hitchhiker books), but kept putting it off as I didn’t have the time. I started And Another Thing… just before the holidays on purpose – so that I’d stand a chance of finishing it.
And with four days to spare, I did. It took a lot of plodding, though it’s not a difficult read. It is very much a HHG novel. Credit to Colfer for that. He writes very well and has raised his level, for want of a better way of putting it, into the adult field perfectly.
I do have gripes, though. The story is good. In fact, I prefer it to Mostly Harmless, which I thought was actually a really poor novel. In fact, I think it’s the only Hitchhiker’s book I’ve never re-read. There’s a great use of language in AAT…, without (much) resorting to poor puns. This is a good thing.
My main issue is the number of times the novel sidetracks into Guide entries which simply aren’t up to the standards of Adams’. Where a simple metaphor would do, Colfer has – in almost every single case – used a fictional construct which then requires explanation. This removes so much from the pace of the story-telling that it becomes wearisome.
To me, good humour is quick humour. Jokes that have moved onto the next one before you realise that you’ve missed a chuckle and have to backtrack and enjoy the moment over again. This is why I love the likes of M*A*S*H, The West Wing, Jeeves & Wooster and so forth. Oh, and the original HHG books.
If Colfer had done this a little less (actually a lot less) then I’d have enjoyed the book a lot more. On the other hand, it would have been 30-40 pages shorter. This may not have pleased the Vogons in the publishing house.
There is some great writing in here and some paragraphs that really made me stifle a giggle. It’s good. Following on from such a respected author took a truckload of guts and a moment of idiocy. I’m glad Colfer took on the job as I doubt there are many other authors in this age who could have carried it off as well.
Road Trip to Hell: Tabloid Tales of Saddam, Iraq and a Bloody War: Tabloid Tales of Saddam, Iraq and a Crazy War by Chris Hughes
