BOOK REVIEW: Red Storm Rising

 

Please excuse me for posting two Frivolities in one day.  It’s not that I’m feeling particularly frivolous; far from it.  It’s just that I didn’t sleep much last night, hence lack the energy and enthusiasm for any sort of useful work.  Thus I have time to kill, before being picked up and transported to a glorious Easter crab feed. So, I decided to report on some recent reading – and here it is.

When I finished the Hillerman Navajo cop books I fully intended to tackle the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin series, or perhaps Barbara Mertz’s splendid Amelia Peabody Egyptian mysteries.  However, both seemed so daunting that I read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising.  I enjoyed it.

God knows Clancy was no artistic word smith, but he certainly does know how to whip up an exciting tale.  This one concerns a war between NATO and the Soviet Union, nefariously foisted on the world by the evil Commies, of course.  Naturally, we win.  I particularly enjoyed it because much of the action takes place in Iceland, which my daughter Karen and I visited a few years ago.

One thing I took away from the book was the totally anonymous nature of the war Clancy dreamed up.  In previous wars you usually saw the person you killed; bashed his head in with a rock, stabbed him with a spear, chopped him up with a battle ax, etc.  Not so in the 1980s, apparently.  Plenty of people were dispatched, for sure, but always at long range, using gadgets: radar, sonar, self-guiding torpedoes, SAM rockets, depth charges, and so forth, and lots of other sophisticated stuff.  And the computer reigned supreme.  Or so it seems.

So, I began to think, what will WW3 look like, if we have one – Heaven forfend.  Well, it is a fair bet that it will be fought by a few dozen pimply-faced kids in dark, blast-proof rooms, surrounded, of course, by trillions of dollars’ worth of electronic gadgets.