Unintended Consequences
by John Ross
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Book Summary Information
Author: John RossEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-01
ISBN: 1888118040
Number of pages: 863
Publisher: Accurate Pr
Book Reviews of Unintended Consequences
Book Review: One of the Best books I've read in thirty years!
Summary: 5 Stars
Unintended Consequences could very well be the blueprint for a bloody entry into the 21st Century or, an 861 page warning to the feds, 3Back Off or Die!2 In this exciting combination action-adventure, history and plea, author John Ross has written a major piece of libertarian literature not to be forgotten. It tells the story of Henry Bowman, born in the Midwest in our times. He grows up with middle class values, learns gun handling at a very earlier age and grows up to be a first class marksman, pilot, peaceful and financially independent individual. The reader follows the major events of the 20th Century as we learn about his father, his uncles, the Warsaw Ghetto in WWII, and every federal gun law which gradually begins to strangle legitimate gun owners and, literally, to kill and maim us as we are given highly dramatic and accurate accounts of Ruby Ridge and Waco and other government blunders. Ross inspects the American gun culture with a microscope and the reader is educated as the plot unfolds. Ross succeeds in his first novel by taking what could be dry, technical facts and integrating them into the conversations of his heros. In this manner, we are lead through many of the major pieces of gun legislation, BATF and FBI screw ups and outright butchery that these agencies have perpetrated against innocent Americans. When Bowman is still a teenager, on a canoe trip with a friend he is scouting miles ahead, alone. He comes across a scene where four hillbillies are raping and about to murder a young women. He yells at the men to get them to stop. They leap for their guns. Bowman takes out three of the four with his .44, takes the glasses of the fourth and scares him into assisting the girl back to her home. When Bowman returns to his friend, he encourages him to see how far they can canoe downstream on the river so that night they camp about 70 miles from where the incident took place. Bowman has the presence of mind to refrain from telling his friend about what happened. This lesson is later used as a strategy later on in a big way. Don1t blab and you wont be involved. As the reader observes Henry Bowman growing up, learning how to handle a gun and an aircraft, go to school and deal with the world, we are treated to what a middle class boy sees and hears of the real and political world about him. Perhaps I am biased as a fellow Midwesterner, but the values Bowman learns are the values I learned in much the same way, in the same time period. Thus I am predisposed to identify with Bowman from the start and sympathetic to his problems as the feds begin to close in around his life. At a turning point in the novel, Bowman and his friend Kane are discussing what they should do in response to the feds coming to kill him and Bowman instead ventilating all ten of them. They discuss the moral aspects of their coming actions, how they can do what needs to be done. Then they go about the task of doing them. From this point on the action is non-stop and totally exciting! But the novel has its flaws, many of them, all minor and tolerable. In a technically detailed novel such as this, we never learn how Bowman learns to fly a Citation, a sophisticated twin jet, how he learns to teach self defense classes. We are not told why a certain women is offed. She just gets it in a quick, businesslike manner. Bowman, like Dagny Taggert in Atlas Shrugged, steals a light aircraft in order to get away from the feds. Unlike Taggert, he never offers the owner any compensation. Certain cliches are used by both the good guys and the bad guys. 3In a New York Second2 comes to mind. It1s used four times. The technical level and frequency of gun descriptions and their interior workings are slightly too detailed for the average reader. I have shot and taken apart my guns in Alaska for years and I felt that the level of detail was almost too much. If I feel this way, what does the non-gun owner think? One critic mentioned that the first edition was full of typos. I read the second edition. It had a number of them also, not enough to be distressing but perhaps the third edition will delete the last few. The President of the US who plays an ongoing role in the novel is not properly developed. He wants the bloodshed to end and takes steps to do so but at no point are we told what his record and philosophy toward guns are. By the time a man becomes President of the US, this part of his mind and his record on the issue would be well known. But Ross does not tell us and the character of the President is thus 3/4 missing, relative to the story. However these minor points don1t get in the way of becoming totally rapped up in the action and the implications of the words in front of you! Perhaps Ross makes up for his minor deviations by creating a believable character in Henry Bowman. We observe the major points of his boyhood and adolescence. We see him educated at Amherst. We see his flaws, why he becomes an alcoholic and how he recovers. When the lead starts flying, his strengths and moral purpose are clear to us. This is an extremely controversial novel. It dramatizes and warns the feds that they will be killed if they continue to rape and pillage their way through middle America. It provides a moral defense for a distinct, selective civil war. Unintended Consequences could be the blueprint for future self defense against the alphabet agencies who carry guns and use them too frequently. The author in his preface writes that he hopes they get the message and back off. The terrible thing about this situation is that they do not appear to be doing so! That1s why when I read this book a powerful sense of foreboding came over me. Unintended Consequences is a great book, one of the best I have read in the last thirty years! Ross1 detailed prose and accurate history make for a extremely believable and mighty novel. I urge you to read and heed this major piece of fiction! Fred James Palmer, Alaska November, 1997
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