I carried a more challenging book along on vacation this past week, but once there found I wasn't in the right frame of mind for it. Final Flight was the most appealing title on the small shelf of the resort's library, so I read that instead.The author is a retired Navy pilot and in a position to provide a superabundance of detail about all that's involved with flying jets off aircraft carriers, as well as candid insights about military brass and other things of concern to the good people who lead such lives. Some of the detail is necessary to advance his story. Then there is another level of it that no doubt appeals to his target audience. At times, I felt that he exceeded that threshold as well.Because of the detail, the first 75 pages struck me as a poor imitation of Clancy, but then I encountered the first of several bits of amusing military repartee and decided to carry on and see what happened. Glad I did. Not entirely happy with the way he handled at least one of the characters, and at times I skimmed, but the story was effective and compelling.He could see the reflective tape on the pilot and the bombardier-navigator's helmets whenever his own red anticollision light swept the plane. That was all. Just the outline of two helmets in the darkened cockpit.That's a nice representative image lifted from a scene near the end, when a pair of jets is in hot pursuit of the bad guys. The prose isn't remarkable, but the scene is a well-placed breather in the midst of 100-plus pages of continuously building action. The best thriller I've ever read was probably Little Drummer Girl, and this one doesn't measure up to that standard. Nevertheless, the way the above short passage is used suggested to me that I was in the hands of a competent story teller.
jingoism: patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy.Wow, was everyone in 1988 scared of terrorists, thinking the US armed forces were the only thing stopping the evil, yet bumbling, communists from taking over the world?As a historical artefact, this novel is second-to-none. Nowhere else have I seen such internalized fear and aggression. Nowhere else have the French been cowardly and childishly impressed by United States military hardware, or bisexual nymphomaniacs practising BDSM; nowhere else have the Russians been spies or incompetent (or both); nowhere else has every Arab been religious and fanatical...And the Americans... there's a token drunk, and a token bureaucrat. The elected officials just get in the way of the real men, who Get Things Done...If only this were satire.
What do You think about Final Flight (1989)?
First selection of Suzanne Holland's new book group. I find it hard to understand why this book was written--the author did painstaking research concerning a fatal training flight in 1942, in which three Air Force navigators and their pilot died. There is no question there were many such fatal crashes, both in training and in action. Far more lives lost in this fashion than in actual fighting.He seems to have a compulsion to explore the brief lives of all these fine young men, and he writes with skill and compassion, but it almost seems as though a much briefer magazine article would have sufficed.
—Mary
Stephen Coonts wrote two novels (Flight of the Intruder, and The Intruders) which seem to be primarily about real people, while the other novels he wrote seemed like they were written more or less about cartoon charachters. This is not a bad thing if you know when to take something seriously and when not to. This book is primarily cartoon in nature, Islamic terrorists have a plan to sneak aboard the carrier USS United States and steal a nuclear bomb so that they can deliver it to their parent country and ultimately force the Western world to treat that nation with respect. The action is top rate, and the charachters are pretty good. While the charachters in this story are not as "real" as they were in Flight... They are also more real than they will appear in many later Jake Grafton books.
—Seth
