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Book List

1K views 5 replies 5 participants last post by  2ndAmendican 
#1 ·
I'm trying to put together a list of books for my wife to check out at the Library for us to read. I'm interested in some good books that have a good story line, but also teach a little something. Books like "One Second After" and "Atlas Shrugged", "1984", "Behold a Pale Horse", etc.... Any others along these lines that I should add to my "must read" list? Thanks for any input.

BBill- what was the book you sent me? I was waiting for the second part to come out, and now I can't remember what part one was, or the name of the author.
 
#4 · (Edited)
It's long out of print and hard to find, but "path to savagery" by robert edmond alter
Good Lord, I have that one! And it is a decent read, too. I picked it up in a used book store at least 25 years ago, and I've never seen another copy...


I'd like to recommend three that any responsible hunter or gun owner might also like, all by Donald Hamilton:

"Assassins Have Starry Eyes" (also released as "Assignment: Murder", which came out in 1956. The web said it was reprinted in 1965. It's about a mathematician at Los Alamos, who survives a murder attempt while on a hunting trip. Then he finds out his wife was involved with a subversive organization linked to the Communists, loses his security clearance, and placed on "administrative leave." As the book progresses, he is forced to make a choice between national security and his wife.

The book was written in the days of HUAC and the Red Scares, one of the hotter phases of the Cold War, the time when the the FBI decided Robert Oppenheimer was a security risk. However, the protagonist is from an older, pre-war mindset. I first read this one around 1975; my paperback copy is brown and crumbly and had been glued and taped together over the years. I liked the story when I first read it, but I couldn't fully understand it until I got a handle on how people thought in, basically, my grandfather's generation.


"Death of a Citizen" is from 1960. It was the first of what eventually became the Matt Helm series. That said, forget everything you ever saw on the movies or TV, because the only thing Hollywood kept was the name.

Matt Helm was in his mid thirties, had a wife and three kids, a mortgage, and made a living writing westerns and travel articles. When he and his wife were at a cocktail party in Santa Fe, he is approached by a woman he had worked with in WWII, when he had been part of a small, secret assassination group. The woman tells him he has been re-activated and needs to take out an enemy agent operating in the area. When Helm finds out that his former co-worker had switched sides and was now working for the enemy, she has his three-year-old daughter kidnapped as a hostage to force him to carry out the assassination.

Having gone through the same training Helm did, this was a particularly bad idea. Helm writes off his daughter as lost, turns his truck around, and goes hunting some Commies, because the instructors had trained them to never, ever play the hostage game...


"The Intriguers" is from 1972. After Helm's wife disapproved of some rather spectacular interrogation and slaughter he had performed with his pocket knife while recovering their daughter, Helm had gone back to work for his former outfit, which had made the transition to peacetime spookery. Helm is theoretically a counter-assassin, though mainly used as a troubleshooter. This book was riffed some of the upheavals in the intelligence community in the early '70s, and the Kent State riot in 1970.

This book isn't as easy to synopsize as the first two, mostly because it's a lot more complex. There's some really nasty infighting between rival intelligence outfits in DC. Helm is driving across the country, finding and alerting members of his outfit who can't be contacted by phone. One of them had a daughter who was shot by the police by accident while in a student riot. Her father, a trained assassin, is stalking the sheriff who ordered his men to shoot into the crowd. Helm has to locate him, persuade him to set aside his vendetta, and take care of some other work first.

In one scene, Helm suspects the rogue agent (Janssen) will be targeting the local sheriff next. Helm sneaks up on a low ridge near the sheriff's house toward a likely sniping site. Which is already occupied. Helm jumps him, and finds out it is the 72 year old grandfather of another girl who had been killed by "accidental" fire. Helm has a female passenger along with him on the trip; when she questions what the old man is doing out there, Helm says,

"Miss Borden," I said, "allow me to present Mr. Hollingshead, of Bascomb, Kentucky."

"Hollingshead?" She frowned briefly. "Hollingshead! That was the name of one of the students who... Dubuque, Hollingshead, and Janssen."

"Right," I said. "Apparently, Mr. Hollingshead is another of those perverted oddball characters you object to so strongly, who resent having their kids shot. At least I can't think of any other motive that would bring him clear from Kentucky and put him on the ridge above the sheriff's house with a loaded rifle."

Later, Helm is speaking with the sheriff:

He drew a long, ragged breath. "If the bastard is yours, you ought to keep him in a cage."

"Shit," I said. "Don't tell us what we ought or oughtn't, or we'll just tell you that you oughtn't to go around shooting people's kids, Sheriff. Sometimes it makes them real mad."


Again, a different time, and ways of thinking that were not politically correct even then.


Anyway, these can all be found used for a few bucks on Amazon, and at least one of them has a Kindle edition if you're into that sort of thing.

"Highly recommended" by TRX...
 
#3 ·
James Wesley Rawles - Survivors, Patriots, and Founders
 
#6 ·
Yeah, computer virus takes the power out, and he is trying to get to his "Uncle's" house, who is actually a leader of the resistance. I can't remember the name or author for the life of me, and the second book in the series was supposed to come out around the first of the year, and I want to get it. LOL. THanks again for sending me that book. It was a good read.

TRX, those three sound really good. I know it kind of violated the Constitution, but I feel like had they continued with the HUAC and purged America of those who wanted to change it, we'd be in a much better place now.
 
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