State of Emergency

Rating:
Summary: Pieczenik does what he does best...
Review: To set something straight... Steve is NOT a Tom Clancy whang-bang-action-military-spy-Jack-Ryan writer. If you only like the simple and blant entertainment that offers a Clancy/Pieczenik novel such as the utherly boring OP-Center series, then he is not for you. However, if you are the rare version of a reader who seeks smart, funny and highly inteligent readings, Steve is your buddy for live. His novel traverses in areas most people don't even concider, and subjects joe-six-pack thinks as strange. Drawing heavily on his past, Steve gives us one of his best performances since Pax Pacifica. He writes a lot about politics, gives us his opinions concerning democracy. In many ways SOE is not an adventure novel. It is a sociological and psycological study of what America really is, its values and downsides. Many people get a hard time, foremost the Mormons. But anyone who has a foothold in that area knows how very true his words are. I can only applaud his curage to name these subjects. However, on the downside I want to say that he sometimes submerges himself in long narrations of philosophy and the meaning of democracy at points when another subject is crucial. Example: his heroine floats towards a possible death and starts pondering about what faith really is and what all of his favourite Greek thinkers came up with along the years. I believe Steve's own esprit de finesse should have warned him of such faults. However, in face of such an excellent and well researched book I can only hope that his dreamed-up plot may never come true ... because it just might. And that is his magic. And no, Steve, you have not become a modern-day Cassandra, but rather a modern-day Greek philosopher, Homer or other, and I hope Birdie is well. But would you please replace the picture of you on the last page? It kills your image. {;-)