Category: reviews

The Wave by Todd Strasser

Not my usual genre of choice, but this was recommended by a German friend of mine. I’m a great believer in looking into the past to examine how sociopaths manage to get elected into high office. Successive German governments follow a similar path, which is why The Wave is required reading in German schools.

The Wave

The Wave is a true story and tells of a … well, let’s call it a learning experiment carried out by a history teacher in a US school. The teacher – perhaps foolishly – wanted to show Naziism managed to sweep, apparently unopposed, across Germany.

To this end, the teacher came up with a club for the children, which offered success through discipline, preparedness, and hard work. The ‘club’ had strict rules and promoted equality for all (and that’s a deviation from Naziism right there).

The problem was that the experiment soon got out of hand, with pupils being threatened if they refused to join, and being assaulted if they dared to criticise it. Inevitably, members started using it persecute people who didn’t seem to fit (Jews).

A real eye-opener. After spending a few hours listening, I thought, “So that’s how that happens.” What’s more troubling is seeing it happen again. …

The most troubling aspect of the whole experiment is realising that as human beings, we possess an inherent flaw in our makeup: a self-destructive desire to be enslaved by anyone with a loud voice.

With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz has carved himself a nice little here: crafting well-researched thrillers casting 007 as the central character. Cleverly, Horowitz sets the stories in the fifties/sixties: the Cold War is entering its chilly stage, and the villains Bond faces are nationalistic (as is Bond) and ruthless, but lack unlimited funding and invisible cars (as does Bond).

The story picks up where The Man Golden Gun leaves off: Bond suffers a head injury during his mission to kill Scaramanga. He falls into the hands of the KGB who torture him, brainwash him, then dispatch him to London to murder the head of MI6, his boss, known as ‘M’.

The plan fails, Bond is reprogrammed, and is then sent back to Moscow to foil a plot to increase tensions between Russia and the west.

Needless to say, I enjoyed it. The book is written in Horowitz’s terse, workmanlike style, with little time given to flowery prose and literary navel-gazing. He does set the scene well though, with detailed descriptions of Russian locations that help reinforce the realism. The pace is moderately fast, helped by the lack of superfluous detail. Bear in mind, however, this is set in the sixties, so Bond’s attitude to women is very much of the time – and that’s not too dissimilar to his attitude towards Russians.

If you’re a Bond fan, then this book won’t disappoint.