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 Reviews for the 2024 Reading Club originally, but I'm adding the 2025 reviews. |
| I started July by reading Fortunes of War, an entertaining war thriller by Stephen Coonts. The book imagines a war between Japan and Russia which occurs because a violent person with ideas about the ancient samurai code has been elected Prime Minister of Japan and has come up with a plan to take the oil fields of Siberia and even orders an assassination of the Emperor to help consolidate power. On the other side, Russia has a government which is almost perpetually corrupt, but the current President is a bastard of the first order. Nevertheless, the United States decides to help Russia in this war partly out of fear that the Russians will resort to nuclear weapons if they don't. Enter an American pilot named Cassidy who is given the mission of assisting the Russians. Cassidy was a flight school instructor whose star pupil is now in the Japanese air force, so naturally these two are fighting on oppsite sides. He assembles a team of American fighter pilots for the purpose, and I would say this is the part I liked the least. Coonts tried to give each of the team members a separate personality. For example, one is an American isolationist, another one is actually a minister, another one has HIV, and another is actually a woman with a Southern accent. But they're not as developed as I wanted them to be. Aside from that, the book's biggest problem is endemic to most miitary fiction, namely that there's a fair amount of technical details and alphabet soup which can be hard to follow. Still, as nuclear war seems to become more and more imminent, the book is definitely a thrill ride. |
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