Review: Why does Amazon insist on titles for reviews anyhow?
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 10 21, 2013
This collection is probably a good starting point for exposure to the author's writing.  And since most--if not all--is available free on the Internet, you can check it out at no cost.That said, the author is a mechanically proficient writer--minimal grammar/punctuation errors, though he does seem prone to tense shifts, especially in his fiction.  He also has a tendency toward repetitiveness and a fairly consistent inability to be concise, in both essays and fiction.There are three stories in this collection.  "Professor Raoul X" is hands down the best of them.  It does suffer from the author's customary unnecessary repetitiveness and is longer than it needs to be...condensing the story a bit and leaving the structure as is would result in a better overall story, though you could also change the structure and expand it.  It also feels most like a true work of fiction, not simply a platform to espouse various political beliefs, and has the first true bit of characterization that I've seen in one of the author's pieces.  Piece rates 3 stars on its own."What I Saw At The Coup" is the second best piece of fiction in the collection, but that's not necessarily saying much.  Suffers from the standard verbosity and repetition as well as the author's need to have things happen now, now, now!  Lots of tell, very little show as we get the details on a Liberal conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution.  First person point of view with the narrator having all the characterization of a cardboard box, there's one awkward spot where the tense shifts from past to present while the author stands on a table to look out the window, apparently while still writing her confession.The third piece, "Alas, Brave New Babylon," is a longish piece that is very weak on story.  Basic premise is economic meltdown immediately followed by what appears to be a nationwide breakdown of energy infrastructure that leads (quickly, of course) to the complete degeneration of humanity.  (Much better take on this theme--minus the economic problems--can be found in Matthew Mather's "Cyberstorm.")  Long piece of proselytizing toward the end, where the narrator muses on the ultimate cause of the fall of humanity at length (while sitting high up on a partially collapsed radio tower that he had previously been concerned about climbing because anybody could see him from miles around).  We get a bit of economic theory but it appears that the real cause of the collapse was general moral turpitude and the lack of real men, most having been emasculated by women and society.  For a change, the story takes place over a three year period, though the reader never gets any real sense of the passage of time; in part it's because so much is glossed over, like the second year which the narrator refuses to think or talk about.  While it's indicated that it's because what he did to survive was too terrible to think about, we have no real clue what those things might have been...though given the repeated mentions of cannibalism and the narrator's obvious disgust for homosexuality, I have my speculations.As for the essays I did read, I was pretty indifferent to them.  Edited and condensed for clarity, they probably would have been okay.  Best of the several that I read was "Benghazi's Smoking Gun? Only President Can Give `Cross-Border Authority'," though it could have been improved by belaboring the point a bit less.