"Hell In a Very Small Place" is what got me to read The Centurions and The Praetorians.Originally Posted by oregon45
Have you read "Street without Joy"?
Also, in one of the various books about the war in Algeria ( I can't remember which, maybe "a Savage War of Peace"?), there is a photo of him on something like three field phones at the same time coordinating an assault of various units.
" La rose est sans pourquoi, elle fleurit parce qu’elle fleurit ; Elle n’a souci d’elle-même, ne demande pas si on la voit. » Angelus Silesius
"There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers." Paul Muad'dib
I’ll contribute a couple from the last few months in no particular order. I would recommend all of them but obviously it depends on your tastes
We May Dominate the World
An overview of American Foreign Policy in Central and South America from the 19th and Early 20th Century.
The Escape Artist
The story of the only Jew to escape from Auschwitz
Mobilising Hate
A look at how the Nazi State corrupted one of the most cultured states in Europe
Charlie Hustle
In depth analysis of the career and downfall of Pete Rose
A Terrible Glory
Custer and the Little Big Horn
The Earth is Weeping
Overview of the Indian Wars. I would put this book right up there with Empire of the Summer Moon
Amusing Ourselves to Death
A Reagan era book and it is stunning how accurate this guy nailed things.
The Coddling of the American Mind
This should be required reading for all University Administrators. Instead they do the opposite
The Righteous Mind
Why can’t we all just get along?
A couple of lesser known Heinlein novels I recently reread.
The Puppet Masters, 1951.
An operative of a secret intelligence agency(modeled on the OSS) gets tasked to investigate the landing of a "flying saucer" in Iowa, and the subsequent news reports that it is a hoax. Even though several other agents have disappeared investigating it.
It is a hoax..the news reports, that is. The saucer was real and transporting sluglike aliens that can hijack a human and use them as automata by riding on their spine. The alien slugs, and their hagridden hosts spread with terrifying speed.
What follows is a creepy horror infused story of possession, 5th generation warfare and psychological cat and mouse between humanity and the slugs.
Pet owner advisory: dogs are nearly wiped out as a species in the war.
Very "Early Cold War" vintage sci-fi, written right after the Roswell incident, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the formation of the CIA. Made into an utterly forgettable 1994 movie starring the ever bland Donald Sutherland. One of Heinlein's earliest "Adult" novels, with some brutal murders, lots of nudity, implicit sex and 1940s sexual harassment. The head of the agency is the archetype for Kettlebelly Baldwin, the cynical, ruthless and amoral director of "The Outfit" featured in Gulf and Friday.
The Sixth Column. 1949.
The only book Heinlein ever collaborated on, developing it as a reluctant favor from a story treatment by his editor Joseph Campbell. Campbell conceived the story in 1941 at the height of the Japanese atrocities in China and Manchuria.
It tells the story of an isolationist US that is eventually conquered by a "Pan-Asian" empire that combines the worst of both Japanese and Chinese cultures and has subdued all of Asia and the Middle East, and checkmated the USSR.
This is essentially a retelling of the IJF shaming themselves in China and subsequently throughout the Pacific.
The central conceit is that a secret military lab in the Rockies has developed a miracle Wunderwaffen(thoroughly Plot Armor), right as the US surrenders. A group of only 6 soldiers are left to devise a way to use it to liberate a thoroughly defeated America under a brutal totalitarian military occupation.
They decide on a series of raids and are set to begin when the Pan-Asians broadcast the announcement of retaliatory executions for an attempted uprising. They slaughter a quarter of a million people in work camps, and then proceed to randomly execute one percent of the American population all over the country on live TV by kicking in doors and machinegunning families.
Clearly, direct action won't work and the soldiers are forced to be clever. So they are.
This is quite an ugly story in many ways because it frankly describes a Race War motivated by hatred and dehumanizing contempt on both sides.
Probably most glaring to sensitive souls is the anti-Japanese racism, with the gamut of conventional Asian slurs and epithets. Even Heinlein(who lost friends, family and Academy classmates in the Pacific War) bitched about the level of venom in Campbell's story, and had to rewrite a lot of the story to tone it down.
Once the vapors subside though, we have Heinlein's signature clever dialogue, pithy wit and intelligent characters. Of particular interest was the informed description of the Hobo subculture of the depression era, anachronistically transplanted into the 21st century, and used as the basis of an military intelligence network. Heinlein would revisit the Knights of the Road again in Starman Jones and several of the Future History stories.
They made a movie out of Puppet Masters - it wasn't that good, IIRC. Donald Sutherland was in it. I liked the book. It also promoted nudism.
The Sixth Column was also released as The Day After Tomorrow. The superweapons from the secret lab were based on some sci-fi physics. Light is supposed electric and magnetic wave crossed. The book had the lab cross Magnetic with Gravitational Waves and Electric Waves with Gravitational waves for all kinds of wonder effects like elemental tranformations - lead to gold kind of things, tractor and pressor rays, forcefields. One racist thing was that a death ray could be produced tuned to 'races' - such as Whites vs. Asians.
Cloud Yeller of the Boomer Age
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