John C Summitt

To read this book is to fall down the rabbit hole into some smoky circle of Hell with Hemingway and Orwell and occasionally Kerouac as your tour guides. War is about death and Dispatches captures the insanity and psychic rot that permeates the landscape of war–particularly, it would seem–this war, and also the fascination and even addiction to it. If one has ever read Hemingway's Soldier's Home and wondered at the disconnect between Krebs and his family and normal life, Dispatches describes what was in Krebs' head. Highly recommended.

None of he stories in this collection are bad and a handful are really good but for the most part I found them to be just competent. There is a sameness to the stories that is disconcerting considering the page-turning quality of his novels. Worth a read if you like Gibson.

A solid collection of stories by an author who is adept at creating a wide variety of characters and finding those moments of revelation in their lives.

Not for the faint of heart, this book is about the violence that men do because it is their nature to do it. They act with animal savagery but in the purposelessness of their actions cannot even aspire to that of animals, whose purpose is to eat. The apocalyptic figure of the Judge, who moves through the story relatively unscathed, does so because he alone openly embraces the nature of humans. The biblical tone of his prose underscores very effectively the complete lack of moral purpose of the characters in the book. Cormac McCarthy is not humanity's greatest cheerleader and he doesn't disappoint in this book.

Being mistrustful of bestsellers and apprehensive of trying to keep track of all those similar sounding Scandinavian names, I put off reading this book for quite awhile. Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and, after picking up the first one, read straight through all three books. Initially I thought my worst fears were confirmed when the author embarked on a lengthy expository interlude to provide background on a newly introduced character but as the characters become established in the reader's mind the pace picks up. It is the ability of the author to deftly create and handle believable characters, particularly Lisbeth Salander, that really propels the story forward. The only criticism I have, and it's a minor one, is the author's penchant for the flights of exposition, but in this case it doesn't bog down the story. One could do a whole lot worse than read these books.