Tag Archives: books

Gun Jesus – in the news and in my mailbox

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I received Gun Jesus‘ book finally. For those of you who didn’t know, Ian McCollum, of Forgotten Weapons fame, has written a definitive book on French military rifles. I’m not   terribly interested in French rifles but I am terribly interested in supporting McCollum’s work. He has done more to keep the interesting and useful gun history alive and in the public knowledgebase than anyone I can think of.

Got the book yesterday and it is, hands down, the nicest gun reference book I have ever seen. I used to think RL Wilson’s stuff was the benchmark to beat for photography and information…no more. Ian’s book is exactly what a gun book should be. It was a long wait for the book, but wow, it was worth it. (Yup, I have the blue cover Kickstarter edition. Early adopter!)

And, speaking of, Gun Jesus hit the bigtime with a mention over at Forbes.com.

How Videos About Old Firearms Became A Hit YouTube Channel

If you’ve never watched his videos, you are sorely missing out.

The ultimate survivor, it seems

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I suppose it is sort of fitting that “The Survivalist” series of books has managed to …uhm..survive…after the death of it’s author. I may be a little late to the party on this, but it appears that despite Jerry Ahern dying a few years back his famous pulp series is continuing on…

I am a bit perturbed by this. Ahern’s original series, which is a guilty pleasure, required a certain suspension of disbelief if you wanted to make it through his books. But, despite the outrageous over-the-top invincibility and deus-ex-machina luck of the main character, there was still a bit of a foundation in reality…at least, up until a dozen books in where it became more sci-fi than just -fi. But even that still had a bit of a tenuous basis in reality. This book tells us “Corrupt politicians, Neo-Nazis, Aliens, the returned Atlanteans or those thought to be dead for centuries; who is about to finally bring down the human race?” Aliens? Atlantis? Ah, poor Jerry….they should have thrown the copyrights in the casket with you and let the series die a somewhat dignified death.

This somewhat parallels the old “Guardians” pulp series which met a similar fate – the original author moved on and strings of ghost writers came in and all consistency went out the window as, again, somewhat-based-in-reality gave in to shark-jumping nonsense.

Hands down winner, though, for most dissatisfying way to end a series goes to “J. Johnstone” of the infamous “ashes” series. A series of pulp novels so formulaic I literally believe they used the exact same text from the previous books and simply changed supporting character names and locations. The final chapter to this series was so dissatisfying and limp that it effectively alienated the few fans the series had left.

Post-apocalyptic fiction is a genre that used to be pretty fringe. It’s become far, far more mainstream as the whole ‘zombie’ thing has become a cultural touchstone for such fiction. Early fiction did exist, of course, but they were standalone books…not series. As best i can tell, Ahern’s series was the first modern post-apocalyptic serial. It’s heartening that there is still an audience for it, but it’s a little sad to see it become what it appears to have become. It’s like an old Hollywood starlet, far past her prime, slathering on makeup and old costumes to try and recapture the magic from her heydaynd instead being a pathetic and pitiful caricature of her past.

As much as I liked Ahern’s series, I think I’m going to give the post-mortem installments a pass.

 

Re-reading some books

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Ok, sure I’m prepared for the zombie apocalypse, and to a degree, everything else. But, my particular apocalypse is economic. It could be a general economic apocalypse like a new(er) depression or massive trade war, or it could be a very personal economic apocalypse like an extended bout of unemployment or a huge undelayable expense like a hernia surgery or something.

A while back I came across this book. That link will take you to my review of it. While the story may not have enough gunplay and cannibal armies for some peoples tastes, the character sketches were what sold me…the everything-will-be-all-right characters, the it-cant-happen-here-characters, and the we-adapt-or-we-die characters.

But for me, what I found most compelling was the descriptions of extended families forced to share one house, people crammed into every space, dinners of bread soaked in grease, homes being squatted in and owners forced out, take-by-force food fights, etc. All he scenarios that seem plausible in a societal collapse. As a result, it makes me wanna go double-check my food supplies and squirrel away more cash and metals. And guns.

Anyway, I picked up a used copy on Amazon for six bucks since I loaned out my other copy and never saw it again. I don’t mind not getting the books back if I loan them out. If it bothered me, I wouldnt have loaned them out in the first place. But to me its worth the cost of a ten dollar book to share it with someone I like if I think it will nudge them towards a more preparedness-oriented lifestyle.

Book – “Alas Babylon”

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This is the book that I think could widely be regarded as the gateway drug into preparedness fiction, and probably to some degree the gateway to developing an interest in preparedness in the first place.
I first read AB when I was 13 years old and it solidified a feeling and interest I’d only recently become aware. (No, that OTHER feeling.) Written back in the halcyon days of the late 1950’s, AB is probably the ‘cleanest’ of the nuclear war novels that followed. By ‘clean’ I mean that there is an absence of the sort of brutal imagery that we’ve come to expect in books about nuclear war. The violence is minimal and not graphic, no one dies of slow starvation, the citizenry isn’t roused to action against a cannibal army, and the characters don’t experience a dramatic renaissance of personal development that leads them into becoming some sort of ‘Red Dawn’-esque ersatz militia. The book simply tells the story a a man, his neighbors, and how they cope with the aftermath of a nuclear war that devastates their region.

For people like you and I who have read tons of literature on the subject, and have a basement full of freeze drieds, you’ll find the book to be a bit frustrating at times with the mistakes or lack of insight that the charcters show to their situation. But the book wasn’t written for survivalists…rather it was written to encourage people to think about survival. The author, whose real name was Harry Frank, wrote the book from the perspective of someone who believed that Americans needed to be more proactive in preparing for a possible nuclear exchange with the Soviets. To this end he wrote AB to illustrate his points.

The action in the book takes place mostly in Florida, in a small town where the main character resides. The cast of characters include pretty much everyone you would see on an episode of The Andy Griffith Show in Mayberry. One interesting thing to note is the 1950’s-era way in which blacks are portrayed. Hey, it was 1959 when this thing was written and ‘colored’ was considered a perfectly good word back then.  Notably, Frank addresses this issue in a very forthright way – the poor black family down the road winds up being an asset to the community as much as any other group and is never treated as anything less than equals.

What’s so wonderful about AB is that unlike many end-of-the-world books, it wasn’t really written with the idea that the main character (or any character, really) has any background at all in survivalism. It seems like in every book there’s always that one character..usually a retired military veteran of some kind…who winds up turning the whole crew into competent guerilla fighters (Lights Out, One Second After, etc.) That sort of thing is absent in AH. Oh, there’s a retired admiral that is a good supporting character but his influence isn’t anything like what other books in this genre show.

Alas Babylon isn’t a difficult read…I read it at 13-years old and found it to be light reading of the easiest kind. But it’s an enjoyable read. The characters are fairly simple, with no real backstory beyond a paragraph or two about their initial history, but it’s still a good story and there is enough variety in the characterizations that it’s easy to find someone you can empathize with.

Good fiction, as I’ve said, make you think. Alas Babylon was one of the first books I’d read in this genre and it certainly made me think about things I hadn’t thought about before. As the book progresses, characters lament the loss of their batteries, matches, soap, fishhooks, and all those other little consumables that we take fro granted. It’s a good example of how the small details in life get overlooked and by the time you realize you should have stocked up on salt (or .22 ammo or instant coffee) it’s too late.

Having been around for almost 60 years it is not difficult to find a used copy of Alas Babylon in pretty much any used bookstore. Even if it doesn’t sound like something you would be interested in reading…not enough zombies or gunplay for you, perhaps…..it is still absolutely worth reading simply because it is the book probably most singlehandedly responsible for influencing most survivalists.

So…no cannibal army, minimal (but reasonably likely) gunplay, no gear-heavy descriptions of equipment (cough*Ahern*cough), and no zombies. But….you do get a good story, set in an interesting time, written by someone who wanted to gently nudge the reader rather than hot them over the head with a hammer. In that regard, given how much this book is cited by survivalists as being influential in their lives, I’d say Frank did a good job.

Available from the usual sources.

 

Article – Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True

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Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.

If you havent read it, Stephen Hunter (of “Point Of Impact” fame) wrote a terrific book, The Day Before Midnight, about some guys busting into a launch facility to do a little DIY WW3. It was a really great book and would make an awesome movie. It’s my favorite book of his, narrowly edging out POI. And, yeah, it’s a little derivative of “Twilight’s Last Gleaming.”

Anyway, the gist of the article is that despite the protestations of the military and the government, there have been times when the ability to launch nukes on one’s own has been possible. I suppose in Cold War planning that made sense – if command-n-control is knocked out there has to be a way for weapons to be used without authorization from the smoldering radioactive ruins of DC.

I mention this because it’s a fascinating little bit of history that sort of segues into preparedness. For those of us who grew up in the world of first strike, second strike, MADD, and Minuteman missiles its rather interesting.

The article is also  interesting because it details how the .gov tried to balance a very complicated equation – nukes had to be tightly controlled so no one could go off-kilter and start WW3 on their own, BUT there had to be mechanisms in place to allow an individual command to launch independently if higher authorities were disabled/destroyed. The solution (if you want to call it that) was two-man rules, no-lone-zones, layers of verification, split codes, and a few other ‘team’ requirements. Basically, it was a lot like having two names on a checking account…without both people signing off, nothing happens. (At least, thats the plan anyway.)

And, to segue to a slightly less on-topic matter, it’s interesting to note that while it supposedly takes more than one person to launch a nuclear attack, it has historically taken only one to prevent it.

Although there is the premise of the rogue individual starting WW3,  most folks are unaware of the rogue individual who prevented WW3. There are at least two Soviet officers (here and here) who, when given the opportunity to allow a some fissionable matter to do its thing, said nyet and prevented what might have been the start of WW3.

Interestingly, once you start looking into these sorts of matters you discover there have been quite a few times that we’ve been just a phone call and a button press away from having a nuclear exchange. Nowdays I suspect the incidence of nuclear war is fairly low but the risk of nuclear attack is unchanged or perhaps a bit higher. Somewhere there is a cargo container with a couple nuclear artillery shells in it just waiting to go through the Port of Seattle or somewhere similar. I mean, you look at the numbers and you realize there is a huge amount of smaller, less dramatic nuclear devices out there…man-portable stuff that some zealot can stuff in the back of a Cessna 182 and detonate over pretty much anywhere. There’s a lot of those little nukes out there..artillery shells, torpedoes, ‘special weapons’, demolition packages, etc, etc….stuff that fits into a 55-gallon drum or smaller.

Anyway, an interesting article for those of us who have an interest in control (or lack thereof) of these sorts of things.

 

 

Unexpected packages

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A surprise in the mail today….Station Eleven: A novel … My first thought was that it was an advance copy from some author or his/her publisher. No, turned out someone liked it and thought I might like it as well. So…to that benefactor, thanks muchly and I promise to read it soon and post about it.

 

Its pretty hard to find good post-apocalyptic fiction so I’m always eager to try something new.

Starship Troopers quote

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

From the scene shortly after a child-killer is executed by hanging:

That night I tried to figure out how such things could be kept from happening. Of course, they hardly ever do nowadays—but even once is ‘way too many. I never did reach an answer that satisfied me. This Dillinger — he looked like anybody else, and his behavior and record couldn’t have been too odd or he would never have reached Camp Currie in the first place. I suppose he was one of those pathological personalities you read about—no way to spot them.

Well, if there was no way to keep it from happening once, there was only one sure way to keep it from happening twice. Which we had used.

If Dillinger had understood what he was doing (which seemed incredible) then he got what was coming to him. .. except that it seemed a shame that he hadn’t suffered as much as had little Barbara Anne — he practically hadn’t suffered at all.

But suppose, as seemed more likely, that he was so crazy that he had never been aware that he was doing anything wrong? What then?

Well, we shoot mad dogs, don’t we?

Yes, but being crazy that way is a sickness—

I couldn’t see but two possibilities. Either he couldn’t be made well in which case he was better dead for his own sake and for the safety of others—or he could be treated and made sane. In which case (it seemed to me) if he ever became sane enough for civilized society. .. and thought over what he had done while he was “sick”—what could be left for him but suicide? How could he live with himself?

And suppose he escaped before he was cured and did the same thing again? And maybe again? How do you explain that to bereaved parents? In view of his record?

I couldn’t see but one answer.

…..

I wondered how Colonel Dubois would have classed Dillinger. Was he a juvenile criminal who merited pity even though you had to get rid of him? Or was he an adult delinquent who deserved nothing but contempt?

I didn’t know, I would never know. The one thing I was sure of was that he would never again kill any little girls.

That suited me. I went to sleep.

 

:shrug::: Crazy people do crazy things because…they’re crazy. When someone commits a heinous crime all the hand-wringing in the world about why and how are pointless – they do it because they’re insane. It’s really that simple. You cannot prevent someone from doing it, but you can prevent them from doing it twice.

Heinlein gets a rough rap about Starship Troopers but, much like Ayn Rand’s stuff, if you can get through it you certainly do wind up doing some thoughtful examinations about the philosophies within. Might not agree with them, but at least you think about things in ways you hadn’t before…that, to me, is the sign of good literature.

 

Books – ,Rawles’ new book

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

I was going to purchase a copy of ,Rawles’ new book the other day,( Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse ), but am seeing some not-so-good reviews on Amazon. Has anyone read it yet and can tell me if it’s worth shelling out the greenbacks? I enjoyed his first book and was hoping he might catch lightning in a bottle again.

Book – “Invasion” by Eric Harry

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

As many of you know, the recent re-make of ‘Red Dawn’ was tweaked ‘slightly’ in post-production. The original bad guys were changed from Chinese to North Korean. Nevermind that those two countries have a vastly different level of military capability. The change was, ostensibly, to make the movie more marketable in the lucrative Chinese market. The more likely reason is that when the original outfit that made this movie went under, it was bailed out by another outfit that had some close financial ties to the Chinese. In short, they didn’t wanna offend the new owners.

Anyway……

I was reminded of a book with a very similar premise – ‘Invasion‘ by Eric Harry. In the book, the Chinese invade the mainland USA in a conventional-weapon operation after isolating the US from it’s allies. The book is full of the things that make an ‘Invasion USA’ scenario interesting – the Special Forces stay-behind doing his one-man war in the captured South, quislings, super-weapon designers, political intrigue, etc, etc. Realistic? Probably more so than Red Dawn. A good read? Well, entertaining, certainly. It isn’t exactly Tom Clancy but it’s a step up from your average post-apocalyptic novel (no cannibal looter army, for example).

Like a lot of books I found fun to read, this one is outta print but used copies abound. If you want something to read to warmup to the new Red Dawn remake, this would be an excellent choice.