THE SURGE is Author Adam Kovac's second release of this deeply felt story of men in combat mode

THE SURGE
ADAM KOVAC
Tortoise Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Larry Chandler knows what his fellow soldiers don’t—that war scars you and haunts you, leaving you with memories you’d prefer not to face. They’re all National Guardsmen serving together in Iraq, but he’s already done a stint in Afghanistan, whereas they’re fresh-faced youngsters on their first tour. The new soldiers are eager for something more interesting than life on a firebase, or boring guard duty at isolated outposts—and they’re about to get their wish.

Adam Kovac has written one of the great novels of The Forever Wars—one that captures both the dust and grit and sweat of soldiers on patrol, and the surrealism of their lives back on base. (Where they might be checking Facebook and ordering lattes one minute, and dodging mortars the next.) In its first edition, it earned comparisons to the likes of Hemingway, Mailer, and O’Brien; this revised second edition promises to find it the audience it so richly deserves.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm connected with Author Kovac across social platforms for ages now, because we support and repost stuff that falls into a leftier, less manosphere-friendly vibe. I got a copy of the DRC from his publisher without mentioning it to him, when one fine day he slid into my DMs asking if I wanted to read it.

Thus proving the old adage "you know your own."

Another old adage proved in this read is "be careful what you ask the gods for lest their answer be 'yes.'" Larry Chandler muses at one point that he doesn't know what to do with the genuine, but not civilian-life-friendly, love he feels for fallen comrades. It's real, this unnamed grief, but it's so very not part of the life your friends, family, spouse at home are leading that you can't see what you can do with it.

For me, that was the emotional heart of this read. In The Yellow Birds, Bartle has a job of work to explain how he survived and another man didn't. In Matterhorn, one of my annual 6*-of-five reads, Waino Mellas had the same gigantic realization in Vietnam. If you're sensing a theme, you're on my signal pretty tightly.

Why I read these war-experience novels by veterans is easy to explain. They are always real and honest; they carry some burden the veteran wants to put down; and they are almost always so polished in the author's writerly imagination that some genuinely lovely turn of phrase leaps out at me:

"People, man, they won’t shut up. Watch. They’ll keep asking what you’re going to do now that you’re back home. Compared to life downrange, I think it might be impossible to find anything as interesting."
–and–
"Civilian world. It’s a dead end. Man knows where he stands here. Where he belongs."

Terse, not flowery, not fancy, but impactful like the sound of an IED just out of sight is.

Why I like reading these stories is also easy to explain. I will never have an experience like this. Even if, as I suspect is the case, this inner conflict ripping up the US does not end without bloodshed, it will not be like this. War has moved on since the Aughties Iraq War. Drones do more killing than people do. I think that will lead to less empathy than even The Surge's men learn to experience. Now you'll simply see the aftermath of killing not commit or participate in it as a group.

I have the luxury of knowing I'll be dead before all that long, so might...probably will...miss most of it. Poor Author Kovac, having lived it, written about it, and now seen it coming again on home soil, just has to gut it out. I'm sorry, my dude. If it's any consolation to you, this story is excellent, and you're a dab hand at bringing your readers along with you as you make a narrative happen for us.

If you're in the modern world and wondering why the right-wing-nuts are whining about men being "too empathetic," read Adam Kovac's novel. Empathy is what war pounds into your skull. If you start out with it, with what it takes to learn it out in the killing fields, maybe...just maybe...you won't do it on command.

That makes this very good story a public mitzvah as well as a pleasure to read.

REVOLUTIONS OF ALL COLORS, bisexual love & happiness just beyond reach

REVOLUTIONS OF ALL COLORS
DEWAINE FARRIA
Syracuse University Press
$22.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Gabriel Mathis, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring fantasy writer and reluctant Russophile, travels to Ukraine to teach English and meets the love of his life: an international arms dealer very much out of his league. Simon—a former Special Forces medic, torn over a warped sense of duty and a child he did not want—returns to the US to pursue his dream of becoming a mixed martial artist. After spending his adolescence defending his bisexuality, Michael makes his mark in New York's fashion industry while nursing resentment for a community that never accepted him.

Farria traces the lives of brothers Michael and Gabriel and their friend Simon from adolescence to their mid-twenties, through Oklahoma, Afghanistan, New York, Somalia, Ukraine, and New Orleans. Revolutions of All Colors is a brash, funny, and honest look at the evolution of characters we don't often see—black nerds and veterans bucking their community's rigid parameters of permissible expression while reconciling love of their country with the injustice of it.

At its core, this is a novel about the uniquely American dilemma of chiseling out an identity in a country still struggling to define itself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: So, what does one do with a story that sets him reeling, causes hours-long meditation breaks, and ultimately makes him want to scream in outrage? How, on each and every page, something just...beats against the inside of his skull? No, not the racism.

I'm used to stories about how hard it is to be Black, but told in the SATANIC SECOND PERSON?! Okay, okay, not *all* of it's in the Satanic Second, but more than the occasional bit it...everything from Simon's PoV. (And why doesn't Michael have a voice? The bisexual and proud of nothing man could be a novel by himself!)

Oh my stars and garters, it took a lot out of me to finish this really well-structured, emotionally resonant as only the most complete and truthful ones are, novel of three brothers. Well, two brothers and a brother-friend who's essentially raised by their father. Quite, quite fraught, these relationships...and it shows in the way the narratives are created: Simon, the outsider, gets the Satanic Second Person narrative voice, which hurts me to see or say; Gabriel (every time I read his name I hear Blow Gabriel Blow, even before...events...transpire) the direct address of first person along with his beguiling love interest the Ukrainian arms dealer; Michael...a ghost, no direct narrative. It's a complicated schema (in the literary sense) that guides the reader's perceptions and responses to each character. It also reinforces the characters' own sense of themselves, with Simon being the perpetual outsider, only addressed never addressing, and Michael the unwanted Other, something he can never forgive the world for. He opts out...bullied bisexual different lad, it's the only way he can see to make himself the center of his own story. He has to vanish himself from the world he came from to present himself in his new milieu of the fashion and beauty industry. And how perfect is that, I ask you....

So the burden of this refrain is that fathering isn't parenting, and mothering can only get a boy so far. The people in your life, all of them, are part of your coming-to-be process for better or worse, and they're there because they could be, chose to be, and chose you. Again, for better or for worse. Simon, whose wildness is more a cosmic scream of agony, never stops, rarely slows, and always disappoints. Hey, it's an identity...and Michael, whose fade-away was so much less theatrical than Simon's, is the one who calls him to account. When their father, their shared father, dies, as we know our elders must, it's bog-standard typical of Simon that he doesn't show for the funeral of this man whose presence in his life was an anchor, a stability that he had to reject to bring into the open the rejection he feels he must deserve. "He was your father too. Closest thing you had. But fatherhood doesn’t mean shit to you, does it?" says Michael, invisible gone-away Michael, to him, hitting the one sore spot that only your real family can reach.

The blow lands; the wound is mortal; but to what, remains the question.

The read is part of the Syracuse University program called the "Veterans Writing Award sponsored by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families and Syracuse University Press." Longer-term readers will remember my review of Thomas Bardenwerper's Mona Passage, also a winner of this prize, and see the thread that connects them: I like reading about people not like me, and not like me in positive, interesting ways. Author Farria writes as a veteran (as I am not) and about bisexual Black men, absolute hen's teeth in the QUILTBAG representation algorithm. Bisexual when unmodified by "man/male/men" is now meant to be read as "woman." Or so it seems in the marketing done to the QUILTBAGgers. I am all for that changing to include the bisexual men of our various overlapping communities.

What made this novel such a good read for me was that acknowledgment that we, the QUILTBAG folk, exist in all families, take up space that we deserve and we are entitled to, and that goes for every family everywhere. It's telling that Michael's bullying drives him away; it's telling that he is the only one to have the standing to call out Simon, the man mired in a sense of himself as unworthy, because Michael has been sent that message as well. It's the way Author Farria makes all those pieces come together that gives me such a vivid and personal sense of this read's message of inclusiveness. It's a screwed up family that produced Simon, Michael, and Gabriel, but it's a family and it is a powerful one to make men whose monstrous sadness and pain didn't destroy them. Take a minute...think about your own life...what were the before-and-afters there? These three men, brothers, are bound by that before-and-after that came long before the showy, flashy one.

Definitely a talented writer's first novel. May many more follow it.

THE MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT, a truly excellent book about conformity's immense costs

THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT
Sloan Wilson
Da Capo Press
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Universally acclaimed when first published in 1955, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit captured the mood of a generation. Its title—like Catch-22 and Fahrenheit 451—has become a part of America's cultural vocabulary. Tom Rath doesn't want anything extraordinary out of life: just a decent home, enough money to support his family, and a career that won't crush his spirit. After returning from World War II, he takes a PR job at a television network. It is inane, dehumanizing work. But when a series of personal crises force him to reexamine his priorities—and take responsibility for his past—he is finally moved to carve out an identity for himself.

This is Sloan Wilson's searing indictment of a society that had just begun to lose touch with its citizens. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a classic of American literature and the basis of the award-winning film starring Gregory Peck.

My Review: 1955. That is, if you're math-challenged, 65 years ago, and the year that Simon & Schuster published this book. So Wilson was writing it in, it's safe to say, 1953 (67 years ago). And this is what Sloan Wilson said:

Money, I need money, {Tom} thought. If they don't build a new public school, I should be able to afford a private school. I should get everything but money out of my head and really do a job for Hopkins. I ought to be at work now....
Money, Tom thought. The housing project could make money, but it depends on re-zoning, and Bernstein says we shouldn't ask for that until they vote on a new school.
A new school, he thought—so much depends on that! ... I should work for a new school, and I should work harder for Hopkins, and I should be making plans for our housing project. Where did I ever get the idea that life is supposed to be anything but work? A man's work should be his pleasure—I shouldn't expect anything more.

Tom Rath has just been to see the overcrowded public school his daughters have to attend because, unlike his own father, he can't afford to put them in a private school. He muses on these thoughts while waiting for a late commuter train into the city, where he will take on a lowly personal assistant's position and, in the process, displace a number of female employees from their physical space.

Sixty-seven years...eleven legitimate Presidencies...since Author Wilson was penning these words, and not that much has changed. Now, of course, it could easily be a mom having these platform reveries, because we've been sold the bill of goods that nannies and au pairs are plenty good enough to raise the kids we've had but don't feel like raising even if it means NOT having a home theater, six DVR-equipped TVs, and each kid with an unshared Xbox. If mom's better at business, dad, YOU stay home and raise those people you engendered. Read to them, make them a snack after carpool, help with their homework. Hiring out parenthood sorta makes it pointless, doesn't it?

Ahem.

Me and my rants.

Author Wilson's book analyzes the sources of Tom's inner discontent as disconnection and materialism. I agree. The alarm bell sounded by this, and by the 1956 movie, went unheeded despite the fact that both were hugely popular and successful in their own spheres. (The movie was popularly supposed to be as good as the book, for once.)

At every turn, MONEY the getting and spending of, obsesses and defines Tom. His wealthy grandmother is being cared for by a greedy granny-nanny, and the hijinks appertaining thereto are most instructive for today's audience. Tom's boss, the venal and piggish Hopkins, plays out before Tom's increasingly revolted gaze his own probable future of alienated kid (extra probable because his three are TV obsessed brats), estranged wife, and grasping mistress(es). Then things get complicated when a wartime indiscretion with an Italian lass provides a surprise to Tom's unsuspecting wife.

Sloan Wilson wrote of his own time. Change the props, update the clothes, and make it about Betsy the wife, and nothing much has changed.

I'm sad about that. So much needless hurt caused in this world from sheer, wasteful greed for MORE when there's more than enough right in front of these hungry-souled people.

About the 1956 film, well...I can only offer as my not-inexperienced opinion that it was turgid, slow-moving, and in the end not up to the bar set by the novel. Gregory Peck was damned good and dull as Tom; Jennifer Jones was much better as Betsy. And can you *even* with the way this went through the studio system! A bit less than a year between publishing on 18 July 1955 to Nunnally Johnson's writer/director's chair for release 12 April 1956! I really want to know the story behind that one.

A Veterans' Day Review of a Thriller By A Veteran 11 November 2013

STRIKE FROM THE DEEP
BOB BRANCO
Maine Authors Publishing
$17.95 trade paper, available now
$4.99 Kindle edition

In honor of Veterans' Day, a thriller by a US Navy Veteran...4-star reviewed!

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Modern-day Somali pirates have been capturing merchant ships for ransom. Suddenly, in a move that rattles the world's economies, giant oil and liquid natural gas tankers are mysteriously taken off Arabia and Africa, far out at sea in the darkness of night. Held for record ransom demands, these ships are taken to strange new pirate hideouts along the North coast of Somalia. When pirates fire on the responding international task force ships and aircraft, the world watches as an entirely new type of war at sea begins.

I requested a copy of this title from the author. He provided it understanding my review would appear here.

My Review: Tom Clancy's death in October 2013 opened the field for military thriller writers for the second time in his career. After he published The Hunt for Red October in 1984, military thrillers were once again on the readerly radar of many many men. Clancy dominated the field he had opened for almost thirty years.

Rest in peace, Mr. Clancy. Your successors are lining up to entertain the men, women, and boys of the world with tense, exciting, well-wrought storylines of high-stakes chases, maneuvers, and back-stage politicking. Here's one of the first to come out of the gate, and it's a strong contender for a place on the military thriller reader's Holiday present list.

Don't kid yourself...it's a novel, but it's not a farrago or a fanciful conceit. Branco took a very real and worsening concern for the shipping industry, piracy based in the lawless failed state of Somalia, and ratcheted up the stakes. I suspect it's only a matter of time before the book is seen as predictive instead of entertaining. If, that is, the events haven't already played out like this, only with more silencing oil poured over them.

When Jason Stewart, commanding the USS Farragut, is ordered to look into the status of a supertanker full of liquified natural gas en route from Nigeria to Mumbai, the plot kicks into high gear and doesn't stop. Alternating sections of the story are told from the major points of view...the pirates, the motivating malefactors, the loyal henchrats...seldom staying with us long enough for the reader to become inured to the action.

Back and forth, cat and mouse, and all told in a spare, clipped narrative voice that feels more like it's overheard than written for an audience, there's just barely time to get in the swing of Lt. (jg) Christine Johnson's duty shift before we're aboard a pirated vessel and experiencing the terror of a crewman about to die, and before that becomes squicky we're in a plush Moscow office listening to a very, very ruthless and unpleasant man give orders that appall the reader who rejects Ayn Rand as a moral guide.

Navy veteran Branco can be relied on for accuracy, and savvy world citizen Branco can be relied on to "get" the power dynamics of world-straddling military forces both pro and con. There is not a jot of doubt about who is doing wrong here, but there is not a hint of lazy, demonizing anticharacterization at work either. Everyone here has a motivation for acting in a particular way, and it's never simplistic.

I am obligated by my inner elitist to mention the intensely annoying lapses in observing the conventions of standard punctuation (e.g., when mentioning a city, one must use the formula "City Name, State Name," and not "City Name, State Name" and then bang on with the sentence!), and I for one do not welcome sentence fragments or dependent clauses plopped in my dialogue without commas to set them off, and don't even get me started on the series or Oxford comma so blithely ignored throughout...but overall, as witness my rating, not even these cavils led me to stop reading (a frequent occurrence, even in well-told stories) or to smack the author upside the head with a single-star rating (less frequent occurrence, as it's more or less the nuclear option when a story is poorly told).

I liked the story. I was excited to see what happened next. I'd say that any reader who laments the loss of Tom Clancy's military thriller creation machine should celebrate this Veteran's Day by ordering a copy of Bob Branco's book and sinking into a satisfied haze of acronyms and action.


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