Robert Harris isn't a bad writer--he's just not a great one. I've read a number of his so-called thrillers (the problem is that they're not that thrilling) and I've always liked them for the atmospherics. Ever since he came up with the wonderful conceit in Fatherland of imagining what Germany would have been like in the 1960s had the Nazis won the war, the point of Harris's novels has always been to use a weak plot to let him dilate on the world around his characters.
Submitted by Kenneth_Collie on Mon, 12/10/2007 - 11:47am.
I can't believe the bs that Greenspan is pushing about the Bush tax cuts?! He testified for them but now he wants to scold the Republicans for fleeing from their principles?
Did he really think that they would have gottent he $1 trillion tax cut through without his support? And isn't it funny that the tax cut is about the same amount the war in Iraq is going to cost us?
Legacy of Ashes reads like a thriller in reverse. It's sort of a secret history of the CIA. But instead of the agency being filled with highly skilled assasins and operatives with their hands on the levers of power in foreign countries, everyone in this book is incompetent or worse. Weiner takes the standard account of the CIA, the paranoia that fueled so much postmodern fiction, and gives it to us from the other side. The only thing this dismissive account lacks is a control group.
I've started a reading group to help me work out some ideas for a book I'm thinking of writing. The group is called What Has Become of Us? and if you're interested in helping me think through the history of the last 13 years, I'd love to have you come join me.
Submitted by Kenneth_Collie on Thu, 08/09/2007 - 2:14pm.
I'm interested in figuring out what happened in the last 13 years. Just after the recession of 1992-1993, everything seemed to change. Even the coming of 9/11 and the war in Iraq hasn't brought the world back to the way it was. So I'm reading a lot of books about the 90s, then I'm going to work on everything since the terrorist attacks.
