Book Review - The Cold Moon

This is the first book of Jeffery Deaver that I have read. I have seen The Bone Collector as a movie and so decided to read the Kathryn Dance series instead of the Lincoln Rhyme series. But then, Dance was introduced in a Rhyme novel. So that's how I landed on The Cold Moon.

It was not so easy staying with the story in the first few pages. Then the action started. Rhyme and Sachs started putting the pieces together in the case of the watchmaker, and Sachs separately started dwelling into the case of the cop corruption. As the clues started revealing more about the killer's plans, the motive of the killer changed..... and changed again..... Oh wait, it changes again. This is one novel where the intelligence of the antagonist equals, or surpasses, that of Rhyme. 

A thoroughly enjoyable novel with a befitting climax as well. I am eager to read more of the author. May be more of Kinesics than Forensics!

Book Review - The Cobra

After a long hiatus I took another book of my favorite author - Frederick Forsyth. I guess this will be the last time that I indulge into Forsyth's books. His style has become predictable and I am starting to confuse some of his novels. I feel that it is time to venture into others' books. But now, back to the novel at hand.
The Cobra starts with the usual "world at risk" kind of problem. The unusual part of it is that unlike the usual espionage novels, the threat is not from bombs, nuclear weapons or missiles. The threat that is handled in The Cobra is Cocaine. That way, this novel has a different premise. Liked it.
The middle portion of the book is where I felt a lot of Déjà vu. Many pieces of information repeated like the explanation of a small amount of Pure converting many tons of Cocaine, like the pressure of failed smuggling on the dealers, and the like. One part of the sequence that I liked is the reintroduction of a character from Avenger.
The end of the novel has a great twist to the tale. After my displeasure with most of his recent books' endings, this was a welcome relief. The ending reminded me of that of The Devil’s Alternative’s . I felt the minor intellectual warmth that made me like this author more than most. But then, this is too low a dose to intoxicate me further. It is ironic that I am going to end my addiction to the author based on his novel about psychoactive drug!

A quick list of the books that I have read, to create a bit of nostalgia:
The Devil's alternative
Avenger
The Negotiator
The Afghan
The Kill List
The Cobra

Step on a Crack - Book Review

It sounds like a sin that I had not heard of James Patterson before. A colleague gave me an audio CD of his book “Step on a Crack”. I am not much into audio books, but wanted to try listening to a story while working. A book is meant to be a book, but the audio book comes closer for those stretched for time. I missed some of the portions of the book since I was deep into work. Anyways, that’s much better than not reading itself. Know what? I look forward to work more than before with the added carrots of audio books. 

On to the book itself, it was great. I felt the suspense so much that I picked up the hard copy book from the library and completed this morning – early morning.

A group of terrorists hold a bunch of celebrities as hostage in a cathedral. The protagonist is a negotiator who is called to talk to the terrorists. That’s a one line story line that the authors have narrated beautifully in the novel.  There are certain aspects though that I would have preferred to have been handled differently. The character of Eugena Humphrey was well developed and nothing happened after that. The author also tried to depict how the celebrity hostages changed during the heist, but that did not come out well.

Step on a crack is the first book in the Bennett series. I am looking forward to reading some of other Bennett books as well. 

The Negotiator - Book Review

After reading The Afghan, I needed one good Frederick Forsyth novel to boost my liking for my favorite author. The Negotiator did not disappoint me. Yes, the ending was a bit too fast and a tad bland without the usual great twist to the tale, but the novel is worth reading just for the first 300 pages.

The Negotiator has its share of layers that Forsyth is famous for, but the layers are not as differentiated as I have seen in his other novels. This results in us being able to guess to a good degree on the relationship between the threads. The threads in the novel are:
1) Oil resources depleting in USSR (yes, the book was written during the period of the undivided Soviet republic) and the army chief planning to launch an attack on a Saudi nation
2) Oil resources depleting in USA and an oil tycoon evaluating alternate options to get oil
3) The new US president getting into a demilitarization deal with his soviet counterpart. The arms suppliers in US, the army personnel in the USSR and few others preparing to thwart the demilitarization plan
5) The planning of a coup in Saudi Arabia
6) A student in a university in England
7) Mercenaries from Belgium
8) A negotiator

I found the vintage Forsyth touches in these places:
a) The title of the novel gives the impression that most of the novel would be about the negotiation. But the fact that the negotiation ended half way into the novel was interesting
b) The "introduction" of the president's son in true Forsyth style
c) The dialogues in the flight from USA to UK wh the negotiator meets the CIA folks

It is a good novel with fast paced action. But I am a bit disappointed with some aspects of it.
a) I was expecting all threads to converge at the climax stages, but some of them ended early. The story of the banker in Arabia had the potential to build into something great, but just frittered away.
b) Of the numerous intelligent agents from the US and UK, I expected some one to do something astonishing. But they too turned out to be like the cops in Indian movies who just watch the hero handle the bad guys.
c) What was the part of the KGB except for giving the hero a good shave and some money?
d) What about the protagonist’s friends in Spain. Poor folks were mercilessly wasted in the novel

The Afghan - Book Review

"Disappointing" would be the right word. The book isn't too bad, but it just couldn't live up to my expectations. The usual twists to the tale in Frederick Forsyth’s novels are missing and the novel has a straight forward and dreary story line. The elongated descriptions on current world scenarios could have also been reduced.
The storyline is about infiltrating the Al Qaeda (blow me down! Microsoft word recognizes this word and does not through a spelling error!) by faking a British ex-soldier to be an Afghan, and thereby spoiling a major terrorist plan. I don’t intend to give off the whole story, but then, there isn’t much anyways to say. There is something about the base of the storyline that is troubling me. The hero’s mom is the daughter of a Brit and an India, and the hero is brought-up in Iran. How could this make him passable for an Afghan? I don’t think Afghans look like Indians.
I have argued with few persons on the greatness of Frederick Forsyth’s style. I am regretful in accepting that I am one down on the argument.

Avenger - Book Review

When I read Frederick Forsyth's "Devil's Alternative", I admired the novel and felt that I might be disappointed reading another novel of the same author as my expectations had become very high. But "Avenger" definitely lived up to my expectations. The same style of weaving the story in different layers and then linking all of them together; dealing with terrorism around the world; providing well researched information on the politics of different countries; and the impressive twist to the tale in the last page. I have admired many authors till the climax of their tales, but my admiration for Forsyth increases with his climaxes.

"Avenger" is just a normal story of revenge. It is the power of narration that makes it a good read. The story is about a young boy killed in Bosnia by a gangster and his grandfather hiring the Avenger to get the killer to the hands of the law. The stories of the avenger, the kid, the grand father, and scores of other people have been narrated well. Forsyth's style of making pieces link using the minutest of links is admirable. The story takes us through the Yugoslavian countries (Serbia, Bosnia etc.), the Gulf countries (UAE, Saudi etc.), Afghanistan, the South American jungles, and ofcourse, the US and UK.

A welcome read to get my thoughts off the daily life and into the world of action and adventure.

Trading Secrets - Book Review

A Wall Street journalist, a broker, and a scandal - it's a one line story that is given even at the back of the book. The interesting part though is the narration of the author who happens to be the journalist involved in the scandal. Imagine a villain of a story scripting it himself!

Foster Winans, the author of the book, is a Wall Street journalist who is pulled into a scandal by Peter Brant, a stock broker. The plot is simple - Foster is to inform Peter on the article that he would write the next day in the journal. The stock market is a very sensitive animal that changes its mood heavily on good or bad news. So articles in a reputed journal like the Wall Street would make it swing by enough magnitude for a broker to make huge profits. It was a nice plan i.e., until the SEC (Securities Exchange Commission) thought otherwise.

The novel is pretty nice and takes us through the lives of two distinct personalities. Foster's story of graduating from a small time column writer into becoming a well known face in Wall Street is nice. But the more interesting part, atleast to me, is the story of Peter Brant. This person was so much indulged at becoming a rich man that he started living the life of the rich even when he was poor, though loans. He dressed rich, learnt only those games that the rich play (golf, polo and the like), and even changed his name to suit his profile. Peter rose from very humble beginnings to become a leading Wall Street broker, so much so that his firm placed ads in papers with his photo.

Quite similar to "Liar's Poker" this book takes us through the rise and fall of people in the Wall Street. "Trading Secrets" is a good read for its narration, for showing the making of a top notch broker, and more than all of these, for showing the pains felt while being involved in a scandal.

Books...

Few lines on the recent books that I read

Alchemist - This was a book that cried to move out of my pending list. Atlast! I laid my hands on it and it turned to be one of the fastest books I have completed till date. Simple language, nice story and less number of pages. The book is good, but I'm somehow not able to relate it to my life as most people seem to claim.

Foucault's Pendulum - If Alchemist was one the simplest books that I've read, then FP was at the other end of the spectrum. I crawled through 100 pages with a part of mind begging to close the book and the other half raising hope that the book might have something later-on that I might miss. But sense prevailed and I've dropped the book. I'm not sure if the culprit lay in the original script or in the translation from Italian to English. Either way, it is definitely not my kind of a read. Wikipedia says, "It is full of obscure esoteric facts about things like Kabbalah, alchemy, and conspiracy theory. The novel is an encyclopedic work, with critic and novelist Anthony Burgess suggesting that it needed an index" (Ref). I agree.

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

The cover of the book says "Soon to be a major motion picture" but I have no idea how. Ninety percent of MSF (I will use the abbreviation of "Monk Sold Ferrari" as the abbreviation of the full title is pretty long) is the conversation between 2 persons on a single night. I can't imagine how a motion picture could be made of a conversation.

The gist of the story (not much of it anyways) is that a highly successful lawyer gets tired of his life and goes to India to understand his purpose of life. After many years, he returns to the west to pass-on his learning to his former colleague and friend. This is what the first 10 pages of the book have, and the rest is pure preachy stuff.

MSF is a book full of advice on how to lead a balanced life. Instead of giving direct advices as in spiritual books, Robin Sharma has adopted the story approach wherein the advice seems to go from one character to another. Somehow all the things in the book seem way too familiar. May be because I've listened to innumerous tales of wisdom since childhood. Or may be because my mind is blocked with the view that I know more about India than some foreign_firstname_Indian_lastname guy who wants to make money by using the fame of his ethnicity (baseless accusation; it’s just my feeling and might not be the fact).


MSF is not a book that I enjoyed, but it is neither something that I detest. I liked the book in parts and especially some of the phrases that sounded good. The one liked the most is
"The purpose of life is a life of purpose"
There are more like
"The best time to plant a tree was 40 years ago
The next best time is now"
If you are a person like me who likes quotes, then go ahead with the book. If you are a person who is not able differentiate between the words "life" and "work", then go ahead with it. But if you are not in any of these 2 categories, and have some other interesting book to do, then MSF could be safely bypassed. I read it only to satisfy my curiosity over hearing its name in many places. Well, curiosity could only kill my time

On Wings of Eagles

"On Wings of Eagles" (OWOE) is a real life story that feels like a fiction novel. My guess is that the author of the novel, Ken Follett, has introduced some amount of exaggeration/addition into the events to dramatize the whole sequence. Anyways, even if that is the case, it has only added to the attractiveness of the book.

The background of the story goes like this. EDS, one of the world's oldest IT outsourcing companies, was doing a project for the government of Iran. The government ran out of money to pay EDS and the company halted its work. Couple of EDS' top executives are arrested by the government in a bid to make EDS continue the project (A good example of game theory?). EDS' head Ross Perot uses his influence and network to try and get his men out of Iran, but the political turmoil in the government make his attempts fail. Ross then decides to take a big gamble by sending a group of men, lead by an ex-army general, to rescue the 2 prisoners by any means. For the rest of the story, I suggest reading the book.

The book has a good fiction-like real life story, a peek into the politics of the 1970s both in Iran and in the USA, and nice narration except for the parts where Follett goes into explaining the personalities of each character. I got a bit bored with the superfluous details in the descriptions. One other thing that I couldn't bear with is the excess adulation of Ross Perot. Something tells me that the novel would have been sponsored by him I can't believe that a capitalist could go to the extent of gambling his company and himself for the sake of two of his employees. The events in the novel were too much dependant on lady luck, but I guess most real life events could be attributed to just being in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.

The novel is called "On Wings of Eagles" as the employees (or just the high-flyers?) of EDS are called Eagles. It seems the novel came as a story -> IMDB Ofcourse, the novel has all the ingredients of a typical US army-based movie.

Liar's Poker

The time that I take to read every book is generally an indication of my liking towards it. The faster I read, the more I like it. But this time around, things have been different. It has taken me more than a month to complete the book "Liar's Poker", and I can definitely point my finger towards my work schedule for being the spoil sport.

LP is all about the culture inside the then-renowned firm "Salomon Brothers", the events that made it the most profitable company in the world, and the events that made it tumble down. The entire text kept reminding me of what my professors kept on bombarding on me through two years - change is the most important part of corporate success. Yes, contrary to my belief a decade back, the higher a company goes, the more it has to innovate and change.

Anyways, the reason that I liked the book is not the philosophy. At least that's not the main reason. The satire that flows through the authors' words is awesome. I have tried reading (and not completed) "The New New Thing" of the same author, but that book is a far cry from Liar's Poker.

LP starts with a really good first chapter wherein the author explains how he gets into the then-renowned firm "Salomon Brothers" and what were his expectations while joining. This chapter is full of satire over the wall-street business. Though the book is quite dated, all b-school grads will still be able to associate themselves with some amount of it as investment banking still prevails as the hot job in b-school territories.

When the author talks about his entry into Salomon brothers, he says that his salary then, at the entry level of his career, was lots more than that of his professors who were at the end of their career. I'm not sure on how much my professors earn, but I guess it is safe to assume that some of my classmates, if not me, earn more than them. "The world is not fair, and I love it that way", says Michael Lewis. So true. There are lots of catch sentences like these in the book. These are things that keep the reader's interest even when the narration slides towards the technical details.

One interesting aspect mentioned in the book is that the bond market, and thereby Salomon, flourished mainly due to an act passed by the government. This reminds me another book that I read about a year back - “The Iron Triangle”, which was the story of a company called “Carlyle Group” that was started to exploit an opening in the tax laws in Alaska. This firm later went on to become a huge group that had (has?) huge connections in the government and in the business scene.

Coming back to LP, the book has a true story with historical facts, and an awesome narration to go with. But, I would suggest readers to venture into the book only if they are comfortable with terms like mortgage, bonds, going short and going long. These terms are explained in the book, but I guess a person without prior background would loose him/her self in the new world of jargons instead of moving with the flow of the story.

Brave New World - A review

There are times when a writer would wish to write stuff that his readers might not at all be interested in. Well, though I've seen very poor responses to my blogs on books, I'll go ahead with this one just to satisfy myself.
The novels that I have read since my last review are "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown and "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. Yes, my reading habit has slowed down from the a-book-a-week regime that I followed few months back. Nowadays I'm more absorbed by crosswords and puzzles than by books. May be the change of my coordinates from next week on may spark a change back towards books.
Since most people would have read A&D, I'll write about BNW (Brave New World).
BNW is a picture of the future presented by Huxley in the 1930s. Believe me; the picture looks too futuristic even today. BNW is a world in which the emotions of people are manipulated and everyone is made to stay in a state of notional happiness. It is a world where children are produced and not born, 'Father' and 'Mother' being irreputable words. Children are classified into alphas, betas, gammas and deltas, and conditioned in accordance to their classification - a futuristic way of castism.
The book began with so much description that I felt like returning it before reaching even the 10th page. But the simple fact that it is a small book made me continue with it. I expected the novel to stop the descriptions somewhere and get on with the plot, the way my all time favourite "Devil's Alternative" did. But my expectation was not to be satisfied. Even after completing the book I'm left wondering what the idea of the novel is.
There are surely few questions that the novel puts forth - What is wrong in having notional emotions? What is wrong if your senses are conditioned to stay happy? What is wrong in being drugged to stay happy? There are even stronger questions being asked in the novel in areas pertaining sex and marriage, which I'm not able to write about due to my own conditioning
All in all, I feel that it is a novel that could be left unread. I've heard that "1984" has a similar concept dealt in a better way. But I'm too saturated with this way of thinking and will avoid it. May be people who haven't read either can try 1984, which is supposedly a classic.

Uneasy Money - Book Review

It's been enough time hearing about P.G.Wodehouse and not having read any of his novels. Though my friends advised me to take one of his novels that has "Jeeves" in the title, "Uneasy Money" was the only available Wodehouse novel in our library. So started my week with uneasy money

The story of the novel revolves around an English man who inherits $5 Million by the will of an eccentric person. The hero feels sorry for the two lone relatives of the eccentric person who are left with nothing. He goes to the US to settle things with them, not knowing that his life is going to change there.

Uneasy Money was an easy read with simple language and brief descriptions. I generally don't prefer reading long descriptions; so the novel suited me better. The base story is very thin and mostly predictable, but the author has narrated it very well. The novel also brings out some of the author's opinions about life, marriage, transformation from boyishness to manliness, people understanding their real wishes etc. Uneasy Money is sprinkled with good humour, but from I have heard of Wodehouse's humour, I guess I am yet to read one of his better novels. All in all it feels pretty good having read a novel that wasn't much taxing on the mind and still entertained me during my daily travelling time.

Next book in hand: "It's Not Luck" by Eliyahu Goldratt

The Brethren - Book Review

Why this book?
I borrowed "The Brethren" from a library because I wanted to read something and I just saw a guy returning this book. I started reading the novel with no expectations from it.

Who is the author?
John Grisham, the name is synonymous with legal thrillers. He was practicing law, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation before becoming a novelist. Seven of his novels have been turned into films

The story? (Don’t worry; I wouldn't reveal much of it)
The base of the story is that of a CIA chief trying to fudge the presidential election. A group of convicted lawyers serving their sentences in a prison are unknowingly affecting the CIA chief's plans. What follows is a slow-paced fall of events that are supposed to be the intellectual fight between the lawyers and the CIA chief, who don't know whom they are up against (either side).

My Take
The Brethren is definitely not a thriller. It could maybe called a time-pass novel. Comparing with some of the novels that I've read so far, "The Brethren" doesn't have the suspense of "The Devil's Alternative", or the flow of "DaVinci Code", or the details of "Airframe", or the different perspective of "Fountain Head", or the knowledge of "The Goal". But surely it's not boring to read. The author manages to keep some amount of the reader's interest throughout the novel.