Richard SapirResenhas

#505 in our old book database. Not rated.

#431 in our old book database. Not rated.

#430 in our old book database. Not rated.

#368 in our old book database. Not rated.

#367 in our old book database. Not rated.

#357 in our old book database. Not rated.

#356 in our old book database. Not rated.

#354 in our old book database. Not rated.

#5 in our old book database

A Roman gladiator found frozen in the Arctic ice is successfully defrosted alive.

The first 2/3 of the book is mainly taken up with Eugenianus's memories of his life from his childhood to how he came to be in the far North, while the rest of the book shows how he reacts to the 1970s. The book has a variety of narrators:Eugenianus himself, a Russian doctor, an American geologist, and a Norwegian nun. It was very well done, showing how different his thought processes and motivations were from a modern person's.

This book suffers from the problem of middle-aged authors trying to capture the sound of teen slang. It never rings true. Remo & Chiun are hired to protect a teenaged government witness who is obsessed with following a popular rock band. Someone has an open contract on her, so Remo faces everything from amateur hitmen to seasoned professionals, all trying to make a quick million. Meanwhile, Chiun is plagued by teenage fans convinced he must be "Somebody".

Improved in many ways from other Destroyer novels I've read. The book still posits that joyless acupressure can make a women fall madly in love with one, which is not my experience, certainly, though I suppose I may be telling on myself Ben Shapiro-style.

Nazis as the bad guys is always a workable idea, though I'm beginning to think one of the authors had a bad experience with a Doctor, as along with dictators, they seem to be the most frequent villains. Having Chiun be respectful and friendly with lepers feels weirdly progressive for the '70s?

A lot is made of Jewish heritage, which also feels very '70s, that idea there is a higher loyalty to religion than country. In the catalog of racist sins from this book series, that's an awfully brief entry.

I recently, on the occasion of Fred Ward's death, re-watched Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins, and I still like it in spite of their being so many intrinsically racist assumptions (compounded by the fact that they cast Joel Grey as an 80-year-old Asian man), not least the specific stated thesis that the biggest problem in America was (implicitly minority) crime.

So I decided to read the original (Remo Williams) book before I wrote up my thoughts on that movie, and oh lord. All of the worst instincts of the movie are here, but compounded by the fact that the author, as far as I can tell, had never met a woman (his mother possibly excepted), and probably not a older Korean man either, in spite of the latter being the co-hero of these books. 8-chan incels have a more realistic mental model of women than Warren Murphy did.

But on the other hand, these books are very readable in a Dan Brown sort of way, with action coming fast and frequently, and the dialogue between Chiun and Remo consistently amusing. I can't, in good conscience, recommend anybody else read these, but I also can't promise I won't keep reading them myself, as a weird look into the '70s male mentality, and a thorough cleanser of deep thoughts.

The shortest of the three Destroyer novels, proper, that I've read, and better for it.

Appallingly racist, as usual, with offensive stereotypes deployed against Arabs, Jews, the French, and American liberals[1][2] (not that, as an American liberal, those upset me). But the two improvements are that much of the information for the first two has been cribbed from John le Carré books (which is smart in that if you're going to steal, steal from somebody good), and it rolls. Once a certain point is reached, it's tough to put the book down.

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[1] "If liberals love people in large masses, [that] is the price they pay [in order] to hate people individually." 2 points, there: I had to clean it up. As with most semi-clever things in these books, a good editor could have added some clarity. Also, I'm not sure he's wrong, or right. It's an interesting idea. I've highlighted a few other lines to give an idea of the prose, both good and bad.

[2] Mind, the book is also largely about the villainy of the oil companies, so it's definitely coming from what is now a leftist position. Of course, in the seventies, "oil companies good" was not the pillar of Republicanism that it is today.

Honestly, I'm not sure what I'm doing reading these books. This entry, in particular, is racist on a level that was likely shocking in the '70s, with dialogue for Japanese characters transliterated to "Engrish" with all of the Ls changed to Rs. It is appalling.

In fairness to this entry, the whole series appears to be like this, with every book choosing an ethnicity of the week, and then abusing them for a while from a position of profound American ignorance. That's above and beyond the magical Korean who is as much the protagonist as the titular Remo.

And then there is the fact that nothing has a whiff of authenticity; usually in a novel like this the author has spent a lot of time researching and thinking about how people or characters would behave in outlandish scenarios, but there is none of that here. It is, again, completely ignorant of people, women, governments, or anything really. It's impressive in a way.

Also, impressive is that these books somehow compel me to keep reading. Things happen the way I expect them to, and yet I'm still wondering how Remo and Chiun are going to get out of this one. I'm not proud of how many of these I'll have finished reading before I die, and I can rationalize by saying they offer insight into the conservative mind of 1970s-90s (which they very much do), or the the preferred popular fiction of the reading public (which is less clear). And yet, I have a feeling this won't be the last one logged. Heaven help us.

A slightly more philosophical entry in the Destroyer series, pondering the ways in which change and time can protect a culture vs distort it. The literary fiction version of this would be a riskier gambit, pitting the antagonist Actatl and their ideas about heritage against Chiun's traditions of Sinanju, but the philosophy in this version doesn't go nearly that deep. Instead the Actatl are merely a secret society of sorts who really don't know who they are messing with.

There are the standard significant issues when it comes to treatment and descriptions of women.

The action is briefly rollicking at the end; bringing in Smith as a potential combatant means there are stakes that the default indestructability of Remo and Chiun usually undermine. I'm don't think it's the best Destroyer book I've read, but I'm also not sure it isn't.

I find it interesting how tight a bead '70s conservative men had on con artists, and how the entire conservative movement was subsequently co-opted and corrupted by the most con-artisty swindler of them all in Donald Trump.

Standard Destroyer pleasures, here, with some amusing dialogue, and a propulsive narrative that makes one want to keep reading. The specifics of this particular book faded fairly fast, and the treatment of women and minorities will never not be a problem, I guess, but as these things go, an entertaining (relatively) early entry.

Even sillier than the average Destroyer novel, and I assure you that it is very silly indeed.

But there is a kernel of something interesting about sport (and the Olympics), and this is in the middle of the Golden Age of Destroyer prose, so it's a very quick read.

As occasionally happens in these books, you can tell Sapir or Murphy visited the ostensible (Eastern European) location shortly before writing, or at least watched an engaging documentary about it, and wanted to get all of his/their ideas about that nation on paper. Which is an approach with both pluses and minuses.

Doubles up on the problematic, with a new protagonist, Ruby Gonzales Jackson (which the name about covers it) and a location that is not geographically specific enough to know if it is Caribbean or African, but is very obviously peopled by black persons.

The Jackson character manages to be even more cringe than Detta Walker/Susanna Dean/Odetta Holmes in Stephen King's Dark Tower books, and I mean the original audiobooks in which you got to hear Steve himself enthusiastically crow (as her character) "Morning, Whitebread!!!" But the instinct is the same, creating a black female superhero who can hang with the leads, and so for these older guys, I guess it's worth giving points for good intention?

Some of the shots at the CIA and Russians are pretty funny, and obviously well deserved, so there's that.

Off-putting enough in its "parody" of Larry Flynt that I've discontinued my straight-line read-thru of the series and have kicked back to an earlier section.

Ironically for a book about how awful Flynt is, the misogyny is off the charts, plus the bad guy is a dud, going down with barely a whimper after an awful lot of buildup.

As one can imagine, this episode, about an enemy looking to bring slavery back, puts the series is in sticky territory. On the one hand, there's a bit of an edge to the satire in which it is posited that a) a lot of Americans would vote to bring slavery back and b) corporations would love to have that happen, both of which are pretty self-evidently true as of 2022. On the other, there's an awful lot of bad guy talk, not explicitly disavowed, about making the (black) victims more productive. So that's extremely ick.

As may be given away by the title, Last War Dance is arguably the most racist of these books I've read, which is really saying something.

That it took almost a month to finish instead of a couple of days, tells how I felt about it. On the off chance you, dear reader, decide to dive into these as I did (which is going to be tricky now that the e-books have all been pulled from Amazon), this is one you can definitely skip.

There are a couple of good lines, all of which I've clipped as notes, should you wish to indulge.

This is one of the few books that I remember even when I forget the title and author, which I have done multiple times since I first read it.
I gives a very compelling view of what the life of a star gladiator in Rome might have been in the very early Christian era, and what a Roman might make of the Roman Catholic Church.

I loved every minute.
And to think this marvel was brought to my attention by the author of a fanfiction story *shakes head*
Really, I'm looking forward to reading the next books in the series.

A cut above most of the other Men's Adventure series this has a nice line in humour and cynicism as well as a (reasonably) believable hero in Remo Williams. Lighter on action than I might have liked and a little slow in places (especially the middle third) but when Remo is on the page it crackles nicely.