Paul's Down-Home Page

Wonderful! Clean, pleasant hotel with a friendly, attentive staff. Great pillows and a curved shower-curtain rod round out the experience (and the free in-room wireless didn’t hurt any either). I’ve stayed at $200/night hotels that weren’t this nice (like the Sheraton Four Seasons in Newark, bah!) Highly recommended.

Rick Atkinson has written a solid book based on his experience as an embedded reporter with the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army during the Iraq war. As a number of Amazon reviewers pointed out, this isn’t the same kind of book as The March Up (which I’ve also read); Atkinson’s book is mostly about Major General David Petraeus, commander of the 101st. Petraeus comes across as a complicated and nuanced figure, and there’s no question that Atkinson has painted a rich picture of what it’s like to be responsible for 17,000 troops and several billion dollars of equipment in combat. However, ultimately I found the book unfulfilling. There’s little discussion of tactics, and the lowest- ranking person Atkinson seems to have talked to is a major. The grunts who make up the 101st are given short shrift, and that’s too bad. If you want to see Atkinson at his best, read his Pulitzer Prize winner, An Army at Dawn, instead.

Chris Whitcomb’s first book, Cold Zero, was a memoir of (part of) his time on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. I found it fascinating, and part of that was because of Whitcomb’s clear, direct prose style. Now his first novel, Black, is out. Frankly, the nonfiction book was better. In Black, Whitcomb’s protagonist is Jeremy Waller, a young FBI agent who joins HRT and ends up involved in a bizarre antiterrorist mission that is much different than it seems. Along with Waller, we have a risk-loving corporate executive who may or may not be a CIA operative, a megalomaniac multibillionaire who may or may not be a traitor, and a wealth of technical detail that may or may not be accurate (in fairness, Whitcomb does a pretty good job with the technology). There are a couple of last-minute plot twists that are regrettably predictable, and the ending is anticlimactic. I think Whitcomb can do better.