Nothing to Lose (Jack Reacher, No. 12)
by Lee Child
|
List Price: Our Price: $4.45 You Save: $5.54 (55%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Nothing to Lose (Jack Reacher, No. 12)
Book Review: Reacher Goes Limp! Military Deserters Have New Hero!
Summary: 1 Stars
Wish I had read the other reviews instead of purchasing this.
Once upon a time, Jack Reacher was a hero. Ex-MP, military career man, took his word seriously, treated everyone fairly and with an open mind, and lived with a code of honor.
The years have not been kind and now we find him as a wretched remnant of the man that he once was. Of course, one must look at his creator, Lee Child, and see a mirror of the sad phenomenon which appears to afflict many writers, actors and others who become successful and then fall victim to the hubris bred by being told how great they are by their newly found friends, the political leftists... suddenly, they find new platforms from which their characters must speak, new causes to espouse, and new ways to mock and ridicule the values held by those who actually made them wealthy.
Examples - in the earlier books, Reacher was a straight forward, honest fellow; not arrogant or conceited, fairly apolitical, and given to keeping his word. But by the time of this story, he has become a leftist, an outspoken atheist, and a liar when it suits his purposes, Oh, and the author finds it necessary for the only 'bad guys' in the book to be a Christian preacher and the US military 'evil war machine'. He unceasingly stresses how vile they both are. He DOES give another portrayal of a minister, an ignorant and befuddled Anglican who smiles like an idiot, has no idea of his theology and apparently drifts through life in a benevolent stupor.
Reacher is now decidedly macho, in his relationship with the young female lead, telling her - late in the story, after she has voiced regrets for a spontaneous physical relationship between them - that she isn't REALLY sorry and that she WILL do it again, with him,right now! Quite condescending and sexist and... macho in the most repugnant sense of the word.
And of course ( SPOILER... as if THAT matters! ) the "good guys' of the book are war deserters, whom Reacher praises, and understands their deep seated confusion, etc. - and the people who smuggle them out of the US to Canada. The US government, naturally, is also carrying out all kinds of secret, underhanded schemes involving depleted uranium and other such drivel, but overall, Reacher has just become a semi-male, castrati version of Code Pink in janitorial drag.
Two notes:
ONE - it is apparent that some authors try to continue with a character or a series after it should have ended. Perhaps they grow tired, perhaps they run out of ideas. Nothing wrong with that. But they should have the integrity to let their heroes fade into the sunset, heads held high, sense of honor and dignity intact. Reacher should have taken a dirt nap a while back, or quietly vanished. Repairman Jack is heading the same way, and the ONLY series to remain strong and plot-driven is the Swagger family series written by the phenomenal author Stephen Hunter. Those tales hold up through the years, and the characters remain lucid and honorable.
TWO - If Mr. Child wanted an air of authenticity about his character, he could have asked ANY vet who served for 13 + years in the services, what the vet thinks of deserters. I can assure you that the words 'gutless' and 'bastards' would be the mildest terms that he would hear applied.
Final recommendation: go back and read earlier Reachers, or early Repairman Jacks, or ANY of Stephen Hunter's Swagger books...or else just give your money to some poor homeless hungry person. Anything is better than spending it on this waste of trees and ink.
Book Review: Not Much to Gain Either
Summary: 3 Stars
Many people spend their lives shuttling between hope and despair. (Pharmaceutical companies love this.) Of course, hope is the better place. No one wants to end up in despair. Lee Child's novel, Nothing to Lose, seems to be an allegory based upon the contrast between Hope and Despair, for the two central towns in this book have these very names. They are small towns located next to each other in a remote and desolate region in Colorado.
Child's trademark hero, Jack Reacher, literally spends a lot of time wandering between Hope and Despair and back again. And again. And again. Hope is a pleasant place with pleasant people, like Officer Vaughan, whose husband is in a permanent vegetative state due to a severe brain injury suffered while fighting in Iraq. Dismal is dreary and menacing. Not pleasant at all.
I had weeks earlier started reading Nothing to Lose, but I set it aside after about a hundred pages due to flagging interest. I picked up Child's most recent (and much stronger) work, Gone Tomorrow, and finished it in a couple of days. This inspired me to finish Nothing to Lose. Hence this review.
In Nothing to Lose, the prose flows very well. Child is a master at describing minutiae. The central character, Reacher, is a veteran of thirteen years' service as an officer in the MP. He's been out of the Army for several years and, on a limited budget, he travels about, looking for adventure and never turning away from a challenge, or a low-cost, but filling, meal. We get a detailed description of many meals and many cups of coffee. We learn that Reacher will typically wear the same set of clothes for several days and then, rather than clean them, he'll just pitch them in the trash and buy another set. The bachelor's dream?
The challenge here is Jerry Thurman, lay preacher for End Times Church in Dismal. Thurman is obsessed with the Book of Revelation and its prediction of the Apocalypse. In fact, he may be eager to speed up the process by acting boldly on his own.
Thurman also owns a huge metal plant just outside of Dismal. In fact, Thurman owns the whole town. It's his feudal fiefdom. Problem is, a lot of people at the plant and in town are seriously ill. Could it be the secretive metal plant? Reacher appoints himself to find out.
There's a weird aiplane ride. A lot of crawling around in the dark. A lot of driving around off road in an old pickup truck and a police cruiser. Climbing of unclimbable walls. A romantic fling with Officer Vaughan, who later confesses to her husband, who has the "IQ of a goldfish." Reacher pounding into submission small and large groups of hostile men with his fists and brutal street-fighting skills.
The plot is just too convoluted. It mostly concerns what happens at Thurman's plant. Are illegal chemicals used in the process of recycling military vehicles that are blown apart in Iraq, with the scraps shipped to Dismal? What about the smuggling of U.S. military deserters to Canada? Is there a secret operation involving Iranian vehicles that are blown apart in Iraq in order to provoke a war with Iran? Is Thurman a man who practices what he preaches, or is he a dangerous fanatic?
It all builds to an explosive conclusion. Read it and find out if that's literal or figurative.
Book Review: From Hope to Despair
Summary: 1 Stars
It is very appropriate that in this, the 12th Jack Reacher novel, our hero travels between two fictional Colorado towns, Hope and Despair, since that is the journey that Lee Child takes his readers on. We start out hopeful as Reacher finds himself travelling from the town of Hope to the town of Despair, simply wanting to stop at a restaurant for a cup of coffee on his way. It becomes apparent very quickly that the residents of Despair don't want him there as he is ignored in the restaurant and four local tough guys arrive to evict him from the premises. Of course Reacher helps them to understand the error of their ways and, after dispatching them, finds himself arrested, convicted of vagrancy and, the next morning, escorted out of Despair and back into the neighboring town of Hope. Of course we know that Reacher doesn't discourage that easily and will soon be returning to Despair. Oh, man, this is going to be good!
Except it's not. What we get, in fact, is the beginning of four convoluted plots intertwining with each other, and not in a good way. Worse still, about halfway into the book it turns into a polemic for the author's left wing political views. He accomplishes this by having Jack Reacher, an Army MP veteran, saying that AWOL deserters in Iraq have more courage that the soldiers fighting there and that the Army regards wounded soldiers as garbage. Amazing. It is as if Lee Child got bored writing this book and turned it over to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times or some crazed blogger from the Huffington Post.
Worse still is Lee Child's continuing defamation of evangelical Christians. In past novels it has been a passing comment such as Reacher's refusal to fly Alaska Airlines since they print Bible verses on meal trays. However in this book it is a full frontal assault on fundamentalist Christians. They are portrayed as crazed people plotting mass destruction to provoke Armageddon and the end times. In addition, Lee Child has complete falsehoods about the source of Bible translations coming out of the mouth of an Anglican pastor. This is maddeningly ignorant and narrow minded stereotying masquerading as entertainment.
But, you may say, if I'm not a Christian or a supporter of the war in Iraq, isn't it possible for me to enjoy this adventure novel? Not very likely. Not only are the plot lines muddled but they are not completely resolved in any meaningful way that would explain the bizarre behavior of the citizens of Despair or bring any of the storylines together.
My disappointment with this book is precisely because of how much I have enjoyed previous Reacher novels. They represent some of the best action/mystery writing around. For that reason, I will purchase, without waiting for the reviews, the next Jack Reacher novel. However, if Lee Child continues to use his novels as a platform for his political views, I will say goodbye to Jack Reacher forever.
Book Review: I hope this is not where Lee Child is taking the series!
Summary: 1 Stars
I found this addition to the 'Jack Reacher' Series to be a disappointment, to say the least. The story begins in the same formula as most of his other tales. He is sitting around somewhere and trouble finds him. OK, fair enough, we expect that. Yet, the first 150 pages rambles on and on with no focus or character development. He just goes back and forth between 2 towns and walks around. Reacher manages to accomplish such truly unbelievable tasks (beating up dozens of cops or infiltrating a secure plant by just walking in), that the author allows him to accomplish for the sake of expediency in the story-line. Then, at the 2/3rds mark, he has a "scooby-doo" moment where he solves the crime by seeing a license plate on a truck going to canada and surmises that since the missing men have neat and tidy hotel rooms and the trucks are going to canada, they must be smuggling our poor AWOL soldiers to Canada to avoid persecution. He then ties that item to a rather sad anti-war/anti-Bush rant, that turns out to be the justification for the entire story. Wow, "is that a sad waste of $8 and two nights of reading?", was my first thought. I wonder if Child could have just written an epilogue on the Iraq war and given us a better story. He hinges his story on 4 details. 1)The Iraq conflict is a senseless mess that is holding captive most of our army and creating desperate deserters who need an "underground railroad" to Canada. 2) Our government is using "heavy artillery" to destroy civilian vehicles in Iraq, and they need to cover this up by sending the cars to a secret waste disposal plant. 3) our M1 Abrams main battle tanks are being destroyed by IEDs and this is so embarrassing that we have to hide it. 4) The evil plant owner who performs this work refuses to protect his workers from Depleted Uranium Armor waste products, and kills an entire town, whilst he tries to cause The Apocalypse. (I am not kidding you, Folks..THE APOCALYPSE!) What is interesting is that 1) we never had mass deserting in the army. We actually had 3 out 4 soldiers re-up for another 4 years.(surpassing the army's recruiting goals, I might add.) If you want 'out' of the army, soldiers just quit and take the dishonorable discharge, rather than become a fugitive and hide in canada! 2) We actually do openly destroy civilian vehicles in Iraq. (just look at military.com or youtube, the vids are everywhere, and the action is far from senseless when the cars are packed with insurgents and C4 explosives heading on a suicide run....) 3)IEDs are made out of 4-200mm artillery shells and buried in the path of the tanks. The blast blows them 50 feet in the air. Any tank would break..No?? 4)the plant owner could hand out hazmat suits for his workers rather than poison them.. Do I need to go on?
So, please Mr Child, make us a better story next time! Keep politics on the nightly news and craft a real nail-biter like the first 5 novels!!
Book Review: Will Reacher be gone tomorrow?
Summary: 2 Stars
I couldn't agree more with the preponderance of reviews here. NOTHING TO LOSE was a slack, ill-conceived mess. Reacher seems to be devolving into a soulless thug who no longer is concerned so much with coming to the aid of the defenseless as with actively looking for trouble. He endlessly circles and infiltrates Despair searching for something - seemingly, anything - to spark his rage against the Machine. Toward that end, he wanders into a secure facility without any legal authority and demands Answers. He starts a bar fight against six beefy townsmen, which he handily wins with a round of furious elbow strikes, which Lee Child appears to regard as having cruise missile accuracy, since Reacher resorts to them more than to his fists. Reacher then caps his evening with the home invasion of an elderly couple, plunks himself down in their living room, and intimidates the wife into making him coffee - black, no sugar. We're way out-dirtying Dirty Harry here.
Meanwhile, back in Hope, whose only inhabitants seem to be a lady cop, a drygoods salesmen, and a couple of diner waitresses, Reacher drinks more coffee, repeatedly shags the cop (whose first name he never bothers to ascertain and whose soldier husband is in a permanent vegetative coma), and works out elaborate crime hypotheses by pushing condiment holders around on a table top. Oh, the suspense.
Then there's the oft-mentioned leftist drivel in support of army deserters and against all-things Bush-Cheney. A violent vigilante with a penchant for what he deems acceptable homicide gets squeamish over a little water-boarding? No way does that compute. Yet we could see this schizophrenic mix way back in THE ENEMY, wherein Child takes a thinly-disguised swipe at Dick Cheney shortly before having Reacher dispatch a colonel whose manners annoy him with a bullet to the forehead.
If it isn't time to give Reacher a dishonorable discharge from crime fiction (he CAN be hugely diverting in his mayhem), it's long past time for his creator to retire the following personal tics :the endless, purposeless vagrancy; so little respect for women that only their surnames are worthy of notice and they rarely survive even as a memory in later books; the clothes disposal gambit and the total absence of hygienic amenities (toothpaste, mouthwash); the obsessive concern with arithmetic and geographic detail, so that climbing a wall becomes a Euclidian ordeal (at least for the reader); the intuitive crime-solving from barely discernable scraps of ephemera that makes Sherlock Holmes look mentally disabled; and, most irritatingly, Reacher's casual takeover of every police authority and crime scene he encounters.
In short, it's time for Jack Reacher to do some growing up. He was human and compelling once. Lose the sangfroid and the brutal, asocial nihilism, and he can be again