Showing 1 - 10 of 10
A word to the wise
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 24/01/2019
» A cloak-and-dagger book again, but this one is the Real McCoy. A veteran CIA operative of three decades, Jason Matthews has seen and done it all. As the saying goes, he knows where the bodies are buried. The theme of The Kremlin's Candidate is that the US is engaged in a second Cold War, brought about by Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin.
Banks grows on you
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 17/08/2018
» It's a relief to read a crime thriller that doesn't bill itself as a psychological mystery. Frankly I'm not an armchair psychologist, much less psychiatrist. I much prefer simple -- what you see is what you get -- people to complex -- you don't know the real me.
Off the bad guys
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 23/06/2017
» Nations are paranoid, apprehensive that they will be attacked from one direction or another. History has shown that today's friends may well be tomorrow's enemies. So they pre-emptively draw up plans for war against neighbours and distant lands, stockpiling weapons.
Open season on IS
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 27/04/2017
» Though the president of the United States is a character in more than a few novels, he is a product of the authors' imaginations and bears little if any resemblance to the actual incumbents. In some stories he's idealised, in others vilified.
A crisis of faith
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 21/04/2017
» While martyrdom indicates the intensity of belief in, not the truth of, a religion, religious wars have been bloody throughout human history. Though not regarded as a war of religion, six million Jews died in the Nazi Holocaust. Christianity in general, Catholics in particular, experienced persecution for centuries.
Combating the beasts
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 24/03/2017
» The world is a jungle and its beasts -- humans and animal -- are out to get us. Can the forces, sworn to protect and defend us, keep them at bay? It's touch and go. The basic task is not to catch them after they've struck, but to prevent them from striking.
The Cold War: Phase 2
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 18/04/2016
» The implosion of the Soviet empire was greeted with a sigh of relief in democracies by all but the cloak-and-dagger novelists. Who would replace the Soviet Union as the common enemy? To be sure, terrorists are sinister, but they lack the cohesiveness that was a mark of the KGB.
Show me the motive
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 24/08/2015
» Motives for acts of violence range from crimes of passion to drive-by shootings -- that is from defending family honour to reducing the food chain indiscriminately. They aren't justifiable under law and are equally penalised. There are a myriad of motives, often the perpetrator unable to explain what made him or her do it ("maybe I drank too much").
An honest lawyer
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 26/01/2015
» This reviewer doesn't know how good a lawyer John Grisham is. Certainly he's no Clarence Darrow, whose winning cases are still talked about a century later. But Darrow didn't pen courtroom dramas, while Grisham does. Many other lawyers do too, with Grisham's regarded, critically and popularly, as the pick of the crop.
Scholar turned warrior
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 29/10/2012
» Wars of succession harken back to earliest recorded history. Turning wives against husbands, sisters against brothers, aunts against nephews. The temptation to wear the crown and wield the power of the throne is greater than the blood ties that supposedly hold families together. If driven away by the monarchy becoming a republic, the royalists wait in exile to be summoned home by the acclamation of the populace.