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Read See How They Run (1997)

See How They Run (1997)

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Rating
3.84 of 5 Votes: 2
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ISBN
0446603929 (ISBN13: 9780446603928)
Language
English
Publisher
vision

See How They Run (1997) - Plot & Excerpts

Not my cup of tea that's fer sure! I guess i am not a fan of Patterson's first books although i am now reading book #2 in his bibliography "Season Of The Machete". Being a WW2 and historic events enthusiast i was only too pleased to see a swastica on my cover (I ordered this book from Abebooks.com and recieved an original softcover edition, which i believe was an UK edition of this book the title is the original title for this novel " The Jericho Commandment) Why books are revised and retitled later on in the game i do not know? I hate to say that Patterson looks for cash grabs however what else can the reader think when a book is retitled and re issued. What i can hope for is it was just a case of Patterson liking the story so much he just reformatted it so more people would get to read which is perhaps a forgotten story. Well at least he did. The first pages and chapters i read it sounded like it was going to be a cool fictatious story on a secret society of Jewish holocaust survivors that band together to Nazi hunt. The further i got in this novel it started to lose me. Patterson is infamous for his plot twists within his writing projects however the much anticipated twist within this was just ridiculous let alone confusing as hell. I will say the last couple of chapters were the most entertaining of the whole novel. The Patterson book i read prior to this was his very first novel "The Thomas Berryman Number" which i hated. See How They Run/The Jericho Commandment was the 3rd book he wrote and it is a little bit better so i see a pattern here he learned as he wrote. Although out of sequence my next read is Patterson's 2nd book "Season Of The Machete" I'm hoping i'm right on his pattern that he is gets better as he goes along as i know the books i have read much further down his bibliography line are all excellent.

David Strauss' life is turned upside down in one fateful day at his family's Scarsdale, NY, home, when, a group of Neo-Nazis attack and kill his grandmother and his wife. At the same time, his brother, who is accepting an Oscar for his work on a film about the Holocaust, is shot to death live on TV. With a little research, Strauss and his former lover Alix Rothschild discover that several ex-Nazi officers and sympathizers have massed together to an effort to return to power. And, in order to prove to the world they are serious, they will unleash Dachau Zwei (German for "two"), a bloody, anti-Jewish campaign culminating in an attack on the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. While I really liked the concept of the book and the thoughtfulness that Patterson put into it, the transitioning from one scene to the next was very sloppy and I lost track of the sequencing of events quite often.

What do You think about See How They Run (1997)?

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." GhandiThis is a definite departure for Patterson and his Cross detective fare; his characters feel the same, but the situation is much harder-hitting, in some ways. Having not been born by the time of any of the events in this book, I think that they were less horrifying or enveloping to me than they perhaps could have been to someone who can recall what actually happened, but they were nevertheless powerful. The best part of the book, I think, in terms of the most impact and attention-grabbing insanity, is chapter 24. I won't tell you what it is, as the shock of it is half the point, but I stopped reading at that point to feel the suckerpunch of it; that was Patterson's pinnacle in this book.
—Jen

See How They Run is a suspenseful book that will get you hooked. It depicts a fictional second Holocaust, or "Dachau Two", as stated in the book. After David Strauss's parents are killed by the Jews, he teams with Nazi Hunters to try to counter the epidemic. One of the members states "Someone in the Strauss family has seriously frightened the Nazis"(Patterson, 93). David now sets out to find out what that is to see if he can use it against the Nazis. However, one of his teammates is killed in a shooting. When he finds his childhood friend, Alix Rothschild, they go to Europe to find more information. Alix was also a victim of the holocaust, and will do anything to stop it from happening again. When the olympics begin, David finally confronts the Nazi leader, the Fuhrer. After that, Alix explains to David what she had known but had never told him. What Alix didn't know was that members of David's family were killed. He says "I am a concerned jew, alix. No one ever tried to exterminate me until your people came along and decided to play god. Until Benjamin Rabinowitz ordered my grandmother and my brother killed. And my wife, who was innocent of all this, was killed, too." Alix didn't know members of his family had been killed, and when she hears this she feels very guilty. David then explains all of the connections he has made. About how his brother Nick communicated with Jews and had the support of the FBI. How his grandmother, Elena, had helped him and participated in convincing Jews to even kill Germans just as revenge for the holocaust. At 11:45 PM, terrorists are getting ready to kill over 600 athletes. Rabinowitz, the Fuhrer, is their leader. David Strauss finds him, and kills him. They find the switch to the ovens that are about to kill the athletes and shut them down, and that ends Dachau Two.
—Ryan

This was a poorly written book. The sentences were choppy, and the way the narrator compared certain actions to scenes viewed on television and movies was annoying and distracting. I normally appreciate how Patterson writes short chapters, but because of the overuse of Jewish, German and Russian titles and names that were not interpreted; the quick description of characters and the scenes; and the inappropriate choices of verbs and adjectives(author desperately trying to sound "literature"); it was difficult for me to follow the story. I don't even recall what the story was actually about. All I can clearly remember is an A class Jewish doctor's family being murdered by Neo Nazis, culminating in a battle between Jewish extremists and Neo Nazis. I could be totally wrong. I lost interest at the beginning of part three because the writing was so bad. I didn't care about the main characters in the least. In fact, I couldn't clearly make out what happened to them at the end, or how the major situation was resolved. I ended up throwing this book in the trash. Overall I had a good weekend.
—Damian Cloud

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