Review: Adrian's Ho-Hum How To Book of War
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 16, 2012
I gave a rather poor review for the first in this series for several reasons. Even allowing for it's stated purpose of being a how to book wrapped up in a story, it gave the wrong how-to's. The story was morally repugnant in many ways and well...I didn't like it. But, during the comments section of my review I got asked if I had read the second. So, I took the gauntlet up and got this one, the second in the series to see how it stacked up.Improvements have been made, I'll be the first to admit it. But I think some of that may be simply because my paleolithic skill-set is not the same as my more modern skill-set when it comes to surviving adversity. My knowledge there is rudimentary and this book is divided fairly cleanly between use of paleolithic skills and battle tactics. Therefore, it could very well be completely out to lunch and I wouldn't be able to parse that out.As the forward of the book states, this is a how-to introduction with a thin skin of story. Oh boy, is it a thin skin. And a lot of it makes zero sense too. For example, why in the world would anyone go paleolithic in the first place? In a survival situation, would you toss your gun and start looking for reeds to make weak arrows? You might make the weak but quiet arrows, but would you completely dump your gun? Ah..no. So, we're given the pretext that Adrian was sort of on a death wish type of march. Yet people with death wishes don't do that much work. It just sort of didn't add up very well.Then there is the whole one man war thing. Oiy. Adrian goes insane and then kills, via torturous poison arrows dipped in bear poo, whole slews of folks. They are bad folks and need killing, sure. No problem there. But why in the world does one hang around for months playing "catch me" with these doofuses? Just not something I'd recommend. And sleeping with a hibernating bear to get warm? Sure. That's a smart survival tip.Overall, I gave this an extra star over the first one, but I really am not at all sure that it deserves it. It seems bad advice, if that is what this story is supposed to provide, to do things the hardest way possible for no reason whatsoever. Plus, the editing is even worse now. There is no way he even did spell check or looked to see if the first words of a sentence are capitalized. It is most distracting for pain to be written as paint and so on.Like the first one, I'm sure I'll get plenty of Not Helpful's from friends and family, which is unfortunate because this is an opinion and when a book hits a market opinions are going to happen. I hope, however, that it will be Helpful to others.