Book Review

I'm a pretty voracious reader, especially when I'm traveling. Getting on an airplane without a book puts me into a state just short of panic. With a book, long plane rides are almost bearable.

I'm normally not in the habit of reviewing books here, but this week's tome seemed to inspire this short review.

I picked up a book by Lee Child, titled Nothing to Lose. I've read a couple of other Jack Reacher books by this author, and rather enjoyed them.

This one was disappointing.

Lee's alter ego protagonist, the strange loner Jack Reacher, is in this story the embodiment of the author's angst and seething rage. Over the war in Iraq, George W. Bush, environmentalism, and especially born-again Christians.

The author apparently couldn't help himself from creating this sort of leftwing political rant in the form of a novel. Too bad, because otherwise I find Lee to be an engaging storyteller.

In this book, the immediate villain is a sort of crazy born-again businessman who doubles as a sort of Christian svengali. He manages to create in this single villain every evil fantasy of the modern American Left.

The villain, you see, is into apocalyptic prophecy. Plus he happens to be an accomplished businessman who knows a lot about chemistry and metals recycling. So he basically recruits an insulated town full of sycophantic followers to help him hurry Armageddon along a bit.

It's fascinating to see how Child's alter ego has his own selective brand of morality. His definition of morality is severely anti-materialist, anti-Christian, and seriously environmentalist. Jack Reacher isn't much into more traditional moral codes, actually disdaining them. Then there's the terrorism angle; in Lee's world there aren't really any Muslim terrorists, he's more worried about his fantasies about Christian terrorists who try to stage mass murder and pin it on Muslims.

My hope is that if I pick up another book by Child, he will have expended his pent-up energy on Nothing to Lose and reverts back to the more entertaining and less self-serving stories I know he can produce.