hey manyeah youyou looking for a hit?I gots another book review for you.hear you've been fiendin. up all night. sweat poring out of every pore. you've been needin' textual satisfaction...oh that sweet book review satisfaction. can't get it nowhere else but here. m.goodreads.com. type it on your cell phone and I'll be at your place in secondsyou know you like ityou know you love ityou know you've been reading since you were six years old.and nobody else is going to deliver you bespoke product, individually tailored to meet your B . R. needs. you've been a dedicated bookist since you were very young, and now the website has found you all, a classic case of computer assisted search.OKAY OKAY I PROMISE I'LL STOPMe llamo Manual. Soy una coca-agricultor colombiano de 27 años. He estado trabajando quince años después la forma. Los norteamericanos - ellos toman mi producto y resopla por la nariz. Para ellos, el producto cuesta 200 dólares el gramo. Yo--yo recibo alrededor de $2 o $3 por día. El Cartel, está basada en San Francisco, tiene las ejecutaras del Amazon--si el cartel Amazon--que es la que recibe los productos de mi labor.My name is Manual. I am a coca-farmer of 27 years age, Colombian. I have been working fifteen years in the fields. The North Americans-- they receive my product and snort if up the nose. For them, the product, it costs $200 per gram. Me--I receive for my day's work $2 or $3. I am stuck in a cycle of poverty and despair, and I want the world to know that I am a family man. I am a father of two daughters.Hello Internet readers. My name is Nurse Practioner Lindsay Fay, and I'm the managing director of the Farm Relief Charity, plc, of the UK, a registered charity. We at Farm Relief want you to know that good people--people just like you and your neighbor--are working hard every day to solve the problem of indigent book reviewers in the Amazon who are stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of text creation through poverty and sad narcisstic attention seeking behaviour.Through the generous contribution of one Like or more, you can make a difference in the life of the Amazon Review Farmer, based in some primitive Third World country like Japan! You can make a difference, because you care.OKAY OKAY SRSLY THIS TIME. NO MOREhey I live for the applause baby. I realise certain types of humour can hit close to home, but face it, WE'RE ALL WORKER ANTS HERE!I'm writingbecause you're readingand although you try to hide itless visuals more textmeansokay, coming down off that heroin smackthat caffeine highthat sugary sweet goodness called a bookdrink with the devil, dance with firetrying to calm my fingerscenterfocusslow it downnow I feel you Virginia WoolfGoodreads baby, I'm writing in a crowded rec room full of frenchies. sorry, reality intrudes, and with french girls staring glaring and batting eyelashes its not necessarily easy to generate smooth flowing paragraphs and coherent thought. you didn't ask for elaboration on the emir fanfare, you did not request more insight into the etienne-nadine dynamic, nor do you care about their african boy toy. so, I'm just generating words for you because we are in the community of the word devourers and nobody cares T.T I mean maybe ethanol fuel will save the world, or maybe we should stop the Nipponese from killing dolphins, but I dunno, I'm an ironist by nature. I have a Norwegian sweater. I'm sweating in the dead of winter, hence, sweater.I want to say baby that the reading addiction is highly respectable. I mean, take a freakin' look at somebody on real smack and tell me that stuff is healthy. the one ONE exception we know from history is that Erdos (pronounced ERDISH) basically wrote modern mathematics whilst strung out on smack (it's true, look it up), but other than, THE HIEARCHY IS CLEARMUSICPOETRYLITERATUREDANCEACTINGHISTORYthat doesn't up to Nine Muses 'cuz the Greeks divided tragedy / comedy into two. maybe we should sayMUSICPOETRYLITERATURETRAGEDYEPIC POETRYDANCECOMEDYHISTORYI dunno. there's room for doubt. but as the last entry pointed out, it's really easy to mess around with historians. and if you just toss an old Roman coin into the local archelogical dig, you can end up seriously impacting historical research as well. I do it because historians are arrogant, pompous, and believe their art is a "science."give me a break. Nijinsky over Chomsky anytime.Music, as German philosophers agreed, is the highest of the muses, and the most impenetrable. but it is possible for mere peons as ourselves to discover the secret messages being passed from one musician to another. I don't even have to repeat "they say you're a cloner / naturally I'm afraid if I do it alone,"; we can even read KPP's Invader as "Indie Pop." sorry if that's recondite, but you know, not everyone is into close reading. [tho' everyone knows the east coast west coast feud, cough]my confession is more like this. people are stuck into their fields. we picked our majors at age 19. and in the old world, we're stuck even further, we're totally lost. 70% of expats working in teaching of some kind, what a sad lot we are. yet some of us in boom economies are driving around BMWs that we leave at the airport before jetting home. the laws-- in foreign countries-- are sometimes draconian ^^vall of this makes for weird hiearchies. as my pally pal pal in the mid east will point out, when you arrive in our expat city and proudly proclaim yourself "thirty years working for [respectable company]", we roll our eyes because we are living on the edge!. o babynow aside from the narcissistic ravings that implies, there is the other question of whether I can give you the full 10000 characters. yeah, I think that's no problem. a deal's a deal and all that. and like british refugee Anthony in Florida, I gotta produce, I gotta give you everything that was asked for.SO... more about musicians. they are strange baby. they are living on another planet. you can instantly identify professional musicians by their look, just as visual artists have highly distinctive appearances. it is only us word smiths that pass unnoticed.(however, wordssmiths also fail miserably at music production; Stephen King and Margaret Atwood are in an ad hoc band, and it basically is terrible, although King is of course a mass market writer so his skilz are also questionable)this bi-cultural membership-- we pass as you normals but interface with artists-- means we can communicate what they think. sorry-- the news isn't perfectly perfect. musicians are an alienated bunch, and they think your lot-- music listeners-- are basically exploitative. if there were ever a goodlistens website, you'd really see a lot of sparks fly. further, musicians peak earlier, on average, are marked by the same divisions (classical vs. rock; avant garde vs jazz) that define other artistic communities, and man o man, they also reflect cultural trends-- i.e., most violinists are asian females or jewish males. yes, many percussionists are epileptics. noiz is an avant garde percussionist band that does not release tracks. much money is made in direct performances, especially now that piracy is rampant.yarr... johnny depp.goodreads and the community's official stance is that Piracy Is Strictly Bad. but the EU is now grappling with a (far-right!) piracy movement. and Ukraine is now being torn apart by the Lemberg (Lviv/Lvov) vs. Kharhiv Russophile dynamic, first pointed out twenty five years ago in Huntington's famous poli sci classic.where this is all leading is to a general confusion of will and intent. our intentions are good, of course; as with most of humanity, but face it, if your future lies in a Parisian garret with your Stradivarius your sole possession, you too would have an embittered perspective on the world. I'm lucky because smartphones are my Stradivarius baby. i don't even need spell checkseparate to that issue there is the issue of supply and demand. as in, since Japan is a Galapagos nation of text and aesthetics, inevitably its products and output will be recondite, understood only by... the select, the elite, the holy few! what do we think of you applied citizens walking around the country?you're obvious!hah, filipinos with pissed off looks tramping down the subway carchinese keeping their tonals down but wearing north face jackets with the logo tearing slightlytrying to blend in, but standing out; your attempts at hiding only draw further attention.how to really pass? try to stand out.I've been navel gazing, I've been wearing emerald green t-shirts with funny Engrish slogans. I've been looking at facebook and I think you look fat in that picture. nevertheless, driving on fumes alone, I can power through this last section. 1 like = 10000 characters, that's the deal. if you want more, click the button.separate to that issue, i will report that of the French boys, one has a good personality and face, but his voice is abnormally deep and therefore odd; the African boy has been sniping; a couple of the other boys are of various quality, and actually there's so many females I can't quite keep up with the personality tracking. i mean, i have ability and slots inside the head, but some are being used up by previous relationships (yeah twitter; yeah FB). this makes it hard to necessarily keep track of every cross-referencing incest relationship in the vast panoply of Margaret Mead socio-anthroapologyface it, you love the turns of phrase. word destroyer. acid vernacular.o my goodreads babies, I am thinking of snow. I am thinking of snowboarding ability. give me a green card!
When it comes to thrillers--a category that most definitely includes this book and the entire Sean Dillon series--I accept a few plot holes and implausibilities and the like as necessities to keep the fun and excitement level going strong. After all, if everyone is rational and of human dimensions, then things won't be as thrilling. But there are limits. And this Dillon outing has far, far too many plot holes--and two, in particular, that you could fly a 747 through. No spoiler here with regard to that latter point, but we learn late in the story that Dillon has been aware of a certain piece of information for quite some time and didn't act on it earlier and properly, even though acting on it earlier and properly would have made life a whole lot easier for a whole lot of people, including himself. And tied to that is the fact that what he learns involves enough funds to obviate the need for another character to have ever done something that he did that landed him in jail. And if that character hadn't been in that jail at that time, etc., etc. So why did the character do what he did when he knew that he had all of this money sitting around? Don't ask me. Another problem I'm having with pretty much every outing in this series is that Hannah Bernstein, the main female character in the series, is basically incapable of taking care of herself in spite of her past successes. It's as if she started to take stupid pills the minute Dillon walked into her professional life, or something. She makes at least one significant and boneheaded decision in each book, and also gets caught by the bad guys in pretty much every outing and then has to be saved by Dillon. Higgins is really missing the boat by not making her a kick-butt character here, opting instead to go for the sort of "weaker sex" stereotype that got old back when 1940s movies were being produced. In this one, Bernstein makes a phone call from an unsecured line in a building that is owned by someone with sympathies for the enemy. And then she talks to her boss without using code, and she uses the real names of people. Yeah, that's something an intelligent operative would do on a daily basis. And guess what? It ends badly. About the only thing she hasn't done yet is to fall down while trying to run away from someone. In any case, my first exposure to the series was two later on in the series relative to this one, and I liked it enough to want to go back and start from the beginning. But playing catch-up has been painful at times as bad patterns have become evident, and I'm in no particular hurry to read the next one in the series at the moment.
What do You think about Drink With The Devil (1998)?
Well, if you have read one of Higgins' books, you've read them all. This is my third. I read the audiobook version and it at least kept me awake when I took my 90-minute drives to classes. I was disappointed that he did not keep the background of the characters going. In fact, characters that were central to previous books were not only peripheral in this book but had no depth or substance. The love story, as always was instant and unbelievable. This will be the last book I read of his --there is just so much one can take of inept villains and almost clairvoyant agents.
—Kathy
Yet another book by Jack Higgins where Dillon et all have to retrieve from the sea (or anywhere else for that matter) some kind of cargo or a top secret document that threatens to expose someone or create havoc for the future of a conflicting region.You would think that as writer Higgins could come up with better and more original ideas, but he keeps writing cookie-cutter books that have plots that are way too similar. You Don't believe me? Look at the plots from these Sean Dillon books:Thunder Point: Sean Dillon agrees to help the British government retrieve the long-lost documents of Martin Bormann. The wreck of Bormann's U-boat has been discovered in the Caribbean, along with a secret list of Nazi sympathizers. The names include high-level citizens from the U.S. and Great Britain. The evidence lies in a watertight briefcase on the bottom of the sea.On Dangerous Ground: The British hire former terrorist Sean Dillon to keep a secret document signed by Mao Tse-tung from coming to light. The document could delay the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong for an additional 100 years and is hidden in the wreckage of a plane on the bottom of a Scottish loch. But Dillon's not the only person searching for it.Drink With the Devil: Sean Dillon plays a deadly cat-and-mouse game with sinister forces as he races against time to recover a vast fortune in gold bullion, hijacked and lost at sea some ten years before.Bad Company: In the waning days of World War II, Hitler gave his diary to a young aide for safekeeping. Now it's threatening to resurface, with explosive contents. Now it is up to White House operative Blake Johnson, together with his colleague in British intelligence, Sean Dillon, to make sure it doesn't.To me that is an insult to the readers who once loved his thrillers. I think from now on I will only read his books if they don't include another top-level document or sunken cargo of some kind.
—Uri
Read this one overnight, in paperback. It's got an IRA / Protestant theme. It's a first rate thriller, no doubt. There's some glib (I believe) tweaking of powerful noses -- showing up the heads of nation states for the hypocrites they. Ruthless killers on first name terms with John Major and Bill Clinton.A gold heist is at the heart of the story. There's a prison break, Mafiosi, and some serious Irish thugs. Written twelve years ago, it still resonates as the economy deteriorates and violence still flares up in Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland.Not sure if I'm reading more into this than is there, but in any case, it's a heckuva a read if it's your type of thing.Uke Jackson
—Uke Jackson
