Unintended Consequences
by John Ross
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Book Reviews of Unintended Consequences
Book Review: A realistic scenario of future America
Summary: 4 Stars
A disturbing potential scenario of the future of America. John Ross was encouraged by his publisher to write Unintended Consequences under a pseudonym - after reading it you will understand why!One could get the gist of the book by reading the last 200 pages only, but John Ross takes you through a tedious, but worthwhile character development excursion into the psyches of the main players in the first 650 pages. The book would not have had the same impact had I skipped them.
Unintended Consequences is destined to become a classic but may eventually be thrown in with the genre of books such as 'The Turner Diaries' and other so-called hate, anti-government, or extremist literature.
I am sure that the many organizations and individuals that monitor so-called hate and anti-government groups, including the Federal government itself, have reviewed the book thoroughly and have drawn conclusions about the sentiments of the author and the collective cultural psyche of Americans that mirror the image he creates of the personalities in the book - principally those of the 'gun culture.'
The plot poignantly demonstrates what could happen if the bureaucracy and internal security forces of the Federal government continues to run amuck generating high profile cases like the Gordon Kahl shootout, Ruby Ridge, Waco, the OKC bombing, and thousands of other not so well known bureaucratic blunders, that have resulted in vast numbers of nameless and faceless individuals languishing in federal penitentiaries, or who have lost their lifes work, savings, and assets, because of some infraction or misunderstanding of federal 'tax'laws with regard to firearms.
It also calls into question the true motives of agencies such as the BATF, originally created as revenue enforcers but portrayed in Unintended Consequences as an SS or Gestapo like agency dressed in black ninja suits, with machine pistols and Kohl-Skuttle Nazi Sytle Kevlar helmets, as the impressive book jacket aptly portrays.
The book, if made into a motion picture, would have to be rated 'X' or about half of it cut out due to sexually explicit and perverted material and disturbing violence. Not a book for bedtime reading to the children for sure.
For his first novel, John Ross has done an outstanding job in portraying a very disturbing, politically incorrect (but accurate), and seedy dimension of the United States Federal Government , and how the freedoms we believe we have, are illusory for the most part, and can be stripped from anyone at anytime.
Some 20,000 new laws are passed every year in this country. The United States has more individuals incarcerated per capita than any other country in the world. We now live in a state where we are all 'citizen suspect,' eventhough we try our best to be law abiding citizens, the sheer number of laws make all but children, criminals by the time they reach adulthood.
Unintended Consequences makes me long for the days when you could leave your doors unlocked, wave at the police without them pulling you over - the FBI were G-Men protecting us from real domestic and foreign threats, and only true criminals knew what BATF stood for.
During the '90s, the Federal government has transformed our country into no less than a police state which you would expect only in the Soviet Union, South and Central America, and China and other Southeast Asian nations.
After reading Unintended Consequences, you will come to this realization and a sense of uneasiness and anxiety will sweep over your body as in an intense and disturbing revelation.
Book Review: so much potential; a firm editor was needed
Summary: 3 Stars
If ideology were the only determinant of what I had to say about this book, this would be a very positive review. I pretty much agree with Mr. Ross about what has gone wrong. But this book needed a firm editor prepared to do some cutting.The book is simply too long, and many parts of it are polemic thinly disguised as dialog. (There are other parts that are a technical manual on sniping and a primer on gun safety thinly disguised as novel. These are very good in their own way, but they don't belong here.) There are parts of the book that really work as entertainment, such as the sequence in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I had just finished reading Israel Gutman's Resistance, a history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and Ross's depiction of those events was riveting. The D-Day events were also powerful, as was the last 1/4 of the book, once the rising starts in America. The literary tool of having an American return after 30 years away, to find that many of our! ! freedoms have been removed, piece by piece, was a clever and effective technique for demonstrating how effectively you can "boil a frog." (Read the book if you don't already know how to boil a frog.) But there are too many places that I can only call self-indulgent fantasy, in which the protagonist, Henry Bowman, is John Ross's alter ego.
Let me carp about something else. Ross's book is filled with historical facts. Some of them I know are clearly correct. (My MA is in History, and my published books and journal articles are such that I have researched some of the events to which Unintended Consequences refers.) Some of the facts referred to in Unintended Consequences are incorrect, though generally minor details, such as the date the Sullivan Law took effect in New York State, or more arguable than Mr. Ross suggests. There are a number of fascinating assertions made in Unintended Consequences that, if they are true, need footnotes, and if they are historic! ! al imagination, that would be useful as well. I fear that ! too many people are going to assume that because much of this novel is about real events, real people, and real cases, that all of it is -- and it's hard to distinguish the historical facts from the imagined details in Ross's work. (And yes, I'm a little jealous because I write serious, scholarly history books that should sell to Unintended Consequences's readers but that don't sell anywhere near as well, because most people would prefer to be entertained, not educated.)
One other warning: there is material here that is inappropriate for children. There is excessively graphic rape, sex, and mayhem throughout the work. Some of it is there to advance the plot and explain motivations (especially Henry Bowman's), but it is still rough sledding for sensitive adults or nearly all adolescents. (I suspect that most conservatives are going to be a little disappointed at the underlying assumptions and lurid descriptions of sex in this book.) At the same time, Ross fails to convey! ! the brutal and random violence that an attempt at overthrowing the U.S. government would almost certainly produce. It is fantasy in many ways, and while intended as a warning to the police state defenders of where they may be taking us, I don't think it strongly enough conveys the hazards that ALL of us face if push comes to shove on this issue.
It's worth reading, if nothing else because so many have read it and adopted it as a sort of "Bible," for their political beliefs, but don't expect it to be a polished and perfect novel.
Book Review: Fiction Based on Fact?
Summary: 4 Stars
A disturbing potential scenario of the future of America. John Ross was encouraged by his publisher to write Unintended Consequences under a pseudonym - after reading it you will understand why!One could get the gist of the book by reading the last 200 pages only, but John Ross takes you through a tedious, but worthwhile character development excursion into the psyches of the main players in the first 650 pages. The book would not have had the same impact had I skipped them.
Unintended Consequences is destined to become a classic but may eventually be thrown in with the genre of books such as 'The Turner Diaries' and other so-called hate, anti-government, or extremist literature.
I am sure that the many organizations and individuals that monitor so-called hate and anti-government groups, including the Federal government itself, have reviewed the book thoroughly and have drawn conclusions about the sentiments of the author and the collective cultural psyche of Americans that mirror the image he creates of the personalities in the book - principally those of the 'gun culture.'
The plot poignantly demonstrates what could happen if the bureaucracy and internal security forces of the Federal government continues to run amuck generating high profile cases like the Gordon Kahl shootout, Ruby Ridge, Waco, the OKC bombing, and thousands of other not so well known bureaucratic blunders, that have resulted in vast numbers of nameless and faceless individuals languishing in federal penitentiaries, or who have lost their lifes work, savings, and assets, because of some infraction or misunderstanding of federal 'tax'laws with regard to firearms.
It also calls into question the true motives of agencies such as the BATF, originally created as revenue enforcers but portrayed in Unintended Consequences as an SS or Gestapo like agency dressed in black ninja suits, with machine pistols and coal-scuttle Kevlar helmets, as the impressive book jacket aptly portrays.
The book, if made into a motion picture, would have to be rated 'X' or about half of it cut out due to sexually explicit and perverted material and disturbing violence. Not a book for bedtime reading to the children for sure.
For his first novel, John Ross has done an outstanding job in portraying a very disturbing, politically incorrect (but accurate), and seedy dimension of the United States Federal Government , and how the freedoms we believe we have, are illusory for the most part, and can be stripped from anyone at anytime.
Some 20,000 new laws are passed every year in this country. The United States has more individuals incarcerated per capita than any other country in the world. We now live in a state where we are all 'citizen suspect,' eventhough we try our best to be law abiding citizens, the sheer number of laws make all but children, criminals by the time they reach adulthood.
Unintended Consequences makes me long for the days when you could leave your doors unlocked, wave at the police without them pulling you over - the FBI were G-Men protecting us from real domestic and foreign threats, and only true criminals knew what BATF stood for.
During the '90s, the Federal goverment has transformed our country into no less than a police state which you would expect only in the Soviet Union, South and Central America, and China and other Southeast Asian nations.
After reading Unintended Consequences, you will come to this realization and a sense of uneasiness and anxiety will sweep over your body as in an intense and disturbing revelation.
Book Review: Response to "crud" review
Summary: 5 Stars
Yea, its easy to try to knock a book that is almost 1000 pages, there is so much to misrepresent. He does state that wealthy people (black and white) stand to lose more because the laws "reward" police departments by allowing the seizure all of property slightly involved. So if a non-dirt poor person spits in the wrong place they seize all of his possession. A really poor person has none, so why bother taking their stuff (it's even more apalling if they do,though.)Ohh, and thanks to our gun laws you have to be rich to own anything interesting enough to have in a book about the second (first, fifth, etc.) amendment(s). That's classism that is real. Yeah sure, you can have a machine gun if you have thousands of dollars to give away, due to the supply and demand, thanks to our gun laws. (Yes, just about straight from the book.)
The black and white thing is outrageous because Ross talks at length about how black people were not allowed to be sold guns due to contrived gun laws. It implies that they are/were abused and not allowed to defend themselves, abused with(by) the governments help. It goes as far as to say the white bigots were trying to keep guns out of the hands of the immigrants and blacks.
I am part German. I find nothing more embarrasing in my heritage than the(my) people who stood by while others in their country were being killed by their government. Those Germans who were involved earned everything the book gave out. He never said anything about the Germans as a whole, just wrote WWII.
The homosexual thing is even more atrocious since the lead character was raped by a group of homosexuals (no, this wasn't gratuitous). The author supported this plot twist by giving the statistics on men as the target of rape as well as women. It implies if our government allowed us to protect ourselves things like this wouldn't happen. We usually blame our self or the perp or our society, but it happens - really - to make cops safer not the people. What % of criminals are caught on their way to a crime solely because of carry laws? When they get there what % of the victims will be equally armed because of carry laws? This is his point in general.
I honestly think that the sex in the book is a result of the rape, i.e.; to show this guy was a true hetero. Understandable I think, as people would just say he (henry) was some homo and white wash the whole thing and be repulsed.
It's also a book that has some very shocking plot twists. It is hard to say that an 800+ page book is a real page turner that you can't put down, but more than any other I have read, this is.
It is also easy to attack a book that has so many facts and is so educational as having some dates that are off. Well, a lot of textbooks are off on the facts in school and no one cries foul even if (or unless) it's black history; ohh, and he never states this is a textbook, nothing wrong with learning.
And most of all it is hard to defend a book when you don't want to give too much away, as I already have. This book is dark and bad things happen, just like life. Ohh and it changed my position about my government on gun control, with enough supporting evidence that I don't care if some facts were off.
This book is rated R, though. Changed my opinions in the same way as "Outsiders" when I was in the 6th grade. Its a little harder to do almost 20 years later. Sorry if the review was almost as wordy as the book :)
Book Review: Insightful but too much detail
Summary: 3 Stars
First I should state that as a European living in the USA, the concept of the general availability of the weapons described in this book - even with the taxes associated - is alien to me. Even the police in my home country don't carry guns (and thus they are rarely shot at).
That said, I did read the book from start to finish. As others have pointed out, even though you may be pro gun control, some of the concepts do apply to other areas of life. The stage at which the book became of serious interest to me, about halfway through when I guess the author decides to make His Point, is when one character returns from living abroad; only at the airport to find a multitude of new regulations that directly, negatively and financially impact his life. In his case, it was gun control: but I quickly saw how it could apply to my own life.
In 1995 I could board domestic flights without even showing ID. 11 years later, I can't even carry aftershave onboard. The author's point is that the multitude of regulations would have been inconceivable had they been introduced in one fell swoop, but individually over time, like the boiling frog, they are accepted.
While I don't advocate the murder of gov't officials, as the characters in this book eventually do, a strong case is made that serious, non-partisan, non-special-interest-group change is needed.
The book's largest flaw is, of course, the depth of detail in the discussions of the various guns presented. Having said that, I did enjoy the explanation of how to pinpoint a moving target hundreds of yards away while factoring windspeed and bullet type.
On gun control specifically it fails to make its case, although this is less relevant. The main characters are one-track-minded, interested only in shooting (and occasionally flying). With their level of expertise of course I would trust them around me with a Solothurn and a case of ammo, but most people spend more time learning how to drive a car than they do being taught how to handle guns. Wouldn't you be terrified riding the NYC subway each day thinking that half the people around you had concealed lethal weapons? The book even hypothesises that the ATF and FBI agents are not adept with the guns they carry, hence their vulnerability and the situations getting out of control.
I'm not convinced with its historical accuracy. The Waco, TX incident puts words in people's mouths that weren't backed up by, say, watching the documentary produced several years later. The author is exaggerating when a British military official states a maximum of 200 IRA members kept the entire British military at bay, as it was the grassroots support of a fair number of citizens who turned a blind eye when necessary that permitted the paramilitaries there to continue their actions.
If you have a lot of time, it's a decent read. I would have preferred more depth of character development on all sides (including the agents, to get inside their minds of why they do this job) in place of technical detail. And to really validate its point, the author could have chosen one or two other walks of American life that have seemingly been needlessly and unfairly impacted by gov't regulation.