A new Jack Reacher book (and some other stuff)
Bookworm on Jun 03 2008 at 7:55 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
A few years ago, quite by accident, I found myself reading The Killing Floor
The New York Times today has a nice profile of Reacher’s creator, Lee Child. If you’re a Reacher fan, or are contemplating becoming one, you’d probably enjoy reading it. The Times does try to add an anti-War angle to it, but Child pretty much backs off from that stance. I do get the feeling, though, from reading the books, that while Child deeply admires the military he, in common with most of the world’s artistic class, opposes the War. Nothing obvious, however, despite what the Times tries to do.
By the way, if you’re not interested in a violent thriller, I’ve got another book for you, which my husband stumbled across at the library. It’s called The Dirt on Clean : An Unsanitized History, by Katherine Ashenburg. It’s a wonderful romp through history, from ancient Greece to the present day, examining different approaches to cleanliness in Europe and America. The descriptions of people who bathed so infrequently that, when they finally took their clothes off, their skin came off too, will have you compulsively reaching for your soap and shower stall.
Related posts:
Email This Post To A Friend
4 Responses to “A new Jack Reacher book (and some other stuff)”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/06/a-battle-over-a.html#comments
http://cannoneerno4.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/president-bush-tolerated-disloyalty-and-paid-the-price/#comment-9348
important links you should read, Book.
Reacher is a huge loner who travels around America violently righting even more violent wrongs.
it is apropos to the first link.
He hardly looks like a condom crammed with walnuts, as a female friend of Reacher’s once described him, and he doesn’t appear to be the sort of person who would be much use in a bar fight.
Killers are not people you want backing you in a bar fight. Not unless you wish to come out of the bar being the only group that is still alive or un-crippled.
You can’t picture him head-butting, or breaking someone’s nose with his elbow.
Most serial killers and sadists are regular citizens from all appearances. Just ask the people that knew them and lived next to them. The fact that the NYTimes seems to try to make a comparison between someone they see as violent in a book and someone they see as ostensibly peaceful in life, is indicative of the NYTimes’ naivety, ignorance, and downright stupidity concerning violence and those that deal in it.
So many books were about heroes who were depressed or dysfunctional, which at one time was a very valid departure, but then everyone piled in and copied it.
Which is rather depressing if it hadn’t been already with the “dysfunctional hero” syndrome.
Y, the Blackfive post was really upsetting. Jack Reacher would have righted that wrong.
Indeed. People justify anti-military stances by saying they support the troops by criticizing the mission. They never could recognize the kind of evil that becomes justified from those same anti-military stances.