A political screed disguised as a novel.
923000
I used to like John Grisham. I have bought every book he's ever written. However, this one may be my last.

It is obvious that Mr. Grisham is an  opponent of capital punishment. And although I don't share that view, that's okay because not only is everyone entitled to their own opinion, but John Grisham, in his earlier novels, has made his views and the workings of the legal profession interesting to read about.

However, this novel misses the mark by a long way. It is one long straw-man argument. The characters are all one dimensional - good or evil. There is no middle ground. The good guys in this story are all liberal saints. Even the real killer, until the very end, is painted out to be one for whom we should have compassion.

And the bad characters? There are many, and unsurprisingly they are all political conservatives - the cops, the prosecutor, the judge, the court of appeals, the governor, the governors aids, the jurors - even the family of the murdered teenager - are all painted to be, not just wrong, not just mistaken, but evil - pure evil.

I read the book to the end, but just barely.

I wish I hadn't bought it. I may not buy another one. And that is a shame.
4358662
One would not suspect from the book's title that the author's intent was political.  While there is much history in the work, it is marred by the author's constant political slant, which makes the reader suspect that he omitted facts and history that represented opposite views.  I bought the book because of my love of dogs and interest in history FAIRLY REPRESENTED.
2574735
Ann Coulter (like all right wingers) traffics in policital and social emotionalism.
Right wingers never have logical arguments for their simple-minded beliefs - their attitudes are a mix of antiquated religious beliefs and out dated prejudices couched in the guise of self-righteousness.
It's all about abortion, and forcing religious beliefs on the populace. It's all about twisting and distorting facts to support their viewpoints and resorting to mud slinging and insults in the place of calm intellectual debate. Probably because they are all hysterical (and not capable of being calm) and have little intellect or logic to back up their side of things.
BTW - to 'Liz' below who called this book a 'novel'. A novel is fiction - not op ed pieces. If you want to call this book a novel then call it 'fantasy' or 'comedy'.
24025
Most of the book feels more like an editorial or opinion page argument rather than a historical narrative.  Every detail presented reinforces the author's view that the institutions of business, government, law, military and church are cartoon villains.  I felt the work to be both misleading and juvenile.
4663173
i can understand that characters have ideals and certain political motivations. thats fine. but when an author clearly panders to an audience he/she thinks isn't smart enough to see through the veneer hiding extremely thin characters and weak plots...well its just time to move on. note to the authors...lose the polemics and take some creative writing courses. we are smarter than this.
365773
I would not call this a medical thriller since so little of it has to do with medicine. It is mostly written as a political thriller in which a bad guy concocts a silly scheme to do away with the president for reasons that the author doesnt bother to explain. There are no characters to cheer for which wouldnt be so bad if the story were compelling, but it is too dull to care much about.
4872909
I wanted to like this and couldn't. In fact, I had to stop reading.

The book should come with the disclaimer that the author's politics runs throughout the narrative. So, if you don't ascribe to his way of thinking, you will find the concept simplistic, if not silly.
2748327
This is more of an alternate history than a novel. It reads like a fictional textbook. As such, it is somewhat interesting. But a novel this is not.
2329140
I bought this book because John Barnes had a story in Lightspeed Magazine that I really enjoyed. Unfortunately, Directive 51 did not live up to those standards. It starts out as a decent sci-fi political thriller but soon morphs into a cartoonish strawman parody of gubmint liberals who are destroying the country in spite of the best effort of the true conservatives who just love America so much.

The plot of the book is that the infrastructure of the United States (and the rest of the world too, I think, though other countries are barely mentioned) is destroyed by an alliance of domestic terrorists and a fictional version of Al Qaeda. The domestics are environmental extremists who want to kill The Big System with plastic-eating nanos and the others operate out of an "unnamed cave in Afghanistan" and deploy a super fusion bomb. It turns out that all the feel-good environmentalists were just unwitting pawns of the mastermind criminal terrorists. Yawn.

The U.S. is unable to assess the threat of this bomb because Obama shut down research a few decades earlier. The only ones who are really prepared for the collapse are the wealthy Libertarians who built literal castles (with bunkers and barbed wire) to protect their families from mobs. They promise to restore order to the surrounding areas.

Meanwhile the president is incapacitated and leadership makes its way down the chain to the power-hungry Senate President Pro-Tem, a Democrat with "old-school" politics. (And since this is the future, "old-school" means present day for the reader, remember.) He immediately starts handing out corruption and nepotism like candy and creates a National Unity Guard of teenagers wearing red berets. He insists on holding national elections and spends the entire presidential debate promising handouts and saying, "On Tuesday, vote STRAIGHT DEMOCRAT!"

By contrast, his Republican opponent wants to add the 10 Commandments to the Bill of Rights but is willing to table that goal in the interest of national unity in a time of crisis. His speeches are allegedly brilliant but rarely quoted in the text. We have to take the omniscient narration at face value when it says they are plain-spoken and appealing to people of all political stripes. No hero worship going on here, nope.

I stopped reading about 60% of the way through. That's when the acting president sends his red-berets to shut down a newspaper that published an op-ed article calling for his impeachment. When a reporter protests, a red-beret pulls out a gun and says, "It's not your f**ing Constitution, you f**ing Republican!"

Yeah. That really happened.
3189728
Titling this book "Voice of Reason" is the literary equivalent of Bush and his advisers dressing Bush up in a pilot jumpsuit so that he could prance about on an aircraft carrier:  An idea that may have seemed good but once executed was goofed on forever after.
Ronn (and what's with the schoolgirlish addition of the extra "n" in his name?) as the self-described "Voice of Reason" has recently opined:
1)  The United Nations right to punish Hussein and invade Iraq is the same as a Parent's Right to punish their kid when the kid won't clean his room;
2)  Pilots on commercial airlines are entitled to ANY weapon they want in order that they may feel safe;
3)  San Franciscans shouldn't have voted for Mayoral candidate Green Party member Matt Gonzalez because Ronn thinks that Gonzalez looks and smells like he needs a shower.
Similar "insight" can be found in Owens' book.  The fact is that Ronn is yet another self-absorbed baby boomer with an absurd sense of entitlement;  a baby boomer who became obsessed with the Seinfeld TV show, viewing it not so much a Comedy but rather a blueprint on how one should lead one's life.  The fact that a publisher thought the world needs Ronn in print is probably a good indication of the publishing world as it exists today.
An insipid book; a vapid book;
3987548
By Bill Marsano. Under the current low standards for political discourse, President Bush is a traitor to his country; he is also Hitler (a role he took over from former Fuhrer Rudolph Giuliani). Our Constitution has been shredded; our civil rights rendered null and void; dissent a grave risk and feminists are "feminazis." We are informed of all this by politically inflamed nitwits who ought to read this book: It will tell them what fascism really is.
Child of privilege, daughter of an ancient family, Azar Nafisi grew up and was educated abroad, not at home under the oppressive Shah. At the University of Oklahoma, she (among other things) joined an Iranian revolutionary students' group. She admits to being only half-convinced; to being carried away by excitement and rhetoric, and she certainly missed the warning signs. Only now does she realize that her revolutionary group "exerted a strong hold over its members' lifestyles and social activities"; that the militants "came to dominate the group, ousting or isolating the more moderate." Chic for revolutionary women was cropped hair, Mao jackets, no makeup.
And so in the fullness of time the Shah was deposed and Nafisi returned to Iran in time for the victory feast--the one in which the Revolution ate its young.
This happens every time but rarely does it happen with such a vengeance. In the new Islamic Republic, the members of Islamic Jihad were mere moderates! And so began the endless oppressions of the innocent public. It was not enough that the war against women--that feared and hated sex--buried them in chadors and veils. No, even wearing nail polish under gloves was a crime.
And this is what Nafisi brings us to: She, an intelligent woman, a professor, a lover of literature, is expelled from her university for not wearing the veil, and as she begins this narrative she is teaching a handful of her old students in her home. They gather once a week to discuss Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jane Austen. They use the last available paperbacks in Tehran--and copies run off on a Xerox machine. And what they are doing is a crime.
A reader needn't go too many pages into this book before he begins to realize what phrases like "shredded Constitution" and "no civil rights" REALLY mean, and they don't mean anything like the inconvenient clauses of the Patriot Act. There's more than enough of literary criticism here, and the politically minded reader can resort to a little skimming to focus on what really counts. Which is this: When you can with a straight face tell a woman the the fate of the entire revolution depends on her wearing a veil(!), then of course you can expel her when she refuses. And such a person can also be abused and humiliated in the street, jumped by armed "morality squads." She can also be beaten. And arrested for long periods of time. Well, once we've gone that far, can she also be killed? Why, yes, she can. Several of Nafisi's other women friends and students met such a fate. And several more of those she left behind (she is now safely and sanely teaching in the U.S.) will certainly suffer similar the same.
This is a sad book, and it is one that shows as well as tells. It's clear that the tyrants who currently run Iran, who simply declare ineligible all candidates who don't knuckle under, are utterly incurious, dangerously certain, homicidally smug. They have the Truth. They own the Truth. That's why there are no books to buy. No need for books when you've got the Guardian Council to tell you how to live, how to behave and what to believe.--Bill Marsano is a voracious reader and a professional writer.
1545506
I was looking for a book of fiction with a setting in the 1950's. A critique of a book is a personal opinion and in my opinion this book has more of a political agenda than a fictional read.  The setting is correct but to me it read like a book for communist sympathizers.  Every other page was about the Rosenberg's or how intellectual and open minded socialists and communists compared to the rest of society. The author has a definite agenda in the writing.  If your politics lean to the far, far left and you want to step back in time then this is probably for you.
793296
I am (well used to be) a very big reader of John Grisham but the last few of his books have not been good. This book unfortunately is a political statement disguised as a novel. I hate it but I don't think I  will buy his next one... Disappointing...
2678559
When the political POV of a story's author isn't obvious, there's something you can look for that will often reveal it: the identity of the ultimate villain.  In right wing leaning fiction the ultimate villain will usually be evil government, for justification of which the author can point to hundreds of examples from history.  In left wing leaning fiction the ultimate villain will usually be evil corporations, for justification of which the author can point to hundreds of examples from fiction.

History?  Not so much.  It is not that corporations are never evil, far from it.  Rather, it is that their evil is greed and their crimes about money.  What's more, the "money men" are abject cowards in comparison with soldiers, spies, and government types.  Corporate criminals are deathly afraid of spending their retirement years at "Club Fed"; they don't hire private armies of ex-spooks and go toe to toe with their national governments because they will lose, and they know it.  (Not to mention the fact that, as a group, former spies and former military tend to be MORE, not less loyal and patriotic, making them poor choices for going against their former bosses and colleagues and countries.)  And what dictatorial governments will do to them doesn't bear thinking about.  Ask the Oligarchs who tried to stand up to Vladimir Putin how that worked out for them.

And in case we missed it, the author even has one his characters name the problem: "The espionage industrial complex."  It is meant to remind you of the previous version of this nonsense, the military industrial complex, which didn't exist either.

Too bad, Adam Brookes offered up some interesting characters in an intriguing thriller, but when he revealed the ultimate bad guys to be corporate espionage types and despite their cover being blown, ALLOWED THEM TO GET AWAY WITH IT, he made his book laughable.  In the REAL world wised up government intelligence agencies would either jail these corporate fools (if they cooperated and told all)...

or simply kill them.  The power of the Gun in the hand of the Government trumps the power of the Wallet in the hand of the Plutocrat.
3653800
The Hearts Invisible Furies is a problematic novel.  Large portions of it are well written, if in a style more functional than artful, but big chunks of it are awkwardly written, more like a work of somewhat roughly honed journalism than effective fiction.  Characterization tends to depend too much on shtick or clich rather than on a deep understanding of peoplelittle ticks of speech or patterns in a conversational style often repeated, say, or the telling gesture in repetitive events.  The plot often descends into melodrama.  The voice of the novel is frequently, if implausibly lacking in self-awareness and is curiously conventional much of the time (though dull might be a better word for it), without any implication that some irony in his obtuseness is intended.  And the whole, much too long book is devised with a too obvious, too crudely realized polemical intent.  Of all these complaints, I suppose the one that troubled me the most while reading it is how much the book resembled a bad movie with its predictable plot twists timed for their effect and reliance on violence to keep the plot running.

Yet the best of it can be moving.  Many of the scenes in it are genuinely funny.  Others are so compelling in theme and narrative drive that one might wonder why the whole book were not as successful.  Some of the dialogue, sometimes for whole sections, is acutely observed and heard.  And sections of it are strikingly effective.

I don't suppose subtlety by itself is a sufficient aesthetic category of fiction.  But this is a novel which from beginning to end is unconcerned with it.  Everything The Hearts Invisible Furies means to say it says time after time without let up.  To be blunt about it, it lacks art, even though a minor part of it is about novel writing and what it means for fiction to be artful.  It makes everything in it too plain, in short, as if what it was writing about was that plain, that much a matter of surfaces or journalistic detail.  There is a pretense to depth about it which the book never realizes, no matter how much it might present itself as more than it is.  Theres something about the whole book that too much resembles a poster or billboard.

One small point:  early in the novel, three strange errors in history appear.  (The novel likes to link its events to historical ones; the appearance of the attack on the Twin Towers is the most unfortunate one.)  It has Castro sending cigars as a gift to someone in 1952.  It places the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the same year.  (Was 1952 confused with 1962?)  And it states that Georges Pompidou was a former prime minister of France in 1959.  None of these details finally matter.  But it would have better if the novelist had gotten them right.  Such obvious mistakes create a lack of trust.

And another:  the best thing about the novel is its title, which comes, as the book makes clear, from Hannah Arendt, writing about Audens face.  That fact alone is worth some pondering after the last page of it has been read.
401883
The authors representation of the U.S. actions during the Cold War were wrong.  Instead of writing a historical novel based on actual facts and events he used his novel to forward his distorted view of the U.S. and used his writing to forward his socialistic philosophy.
3313582
I think this is a politically motivated novel.
The physics involved are at the least a stretch.
"The sad tale of EMP scare-mongering illustrates two huge problems: how politicians use fear to drive policy, and the dismantlement of objective, institutional expertise. These two problems are intertwined. By sidelining objective expertise and utilizing biased experts who are quick to offer distorted, exaggerated pictures of a potential threat, politicians remove the checks built into the system"
Its also a very depressing read.