D. Morgan

The usual British biased opinion

Revisado: 05-15-21

Unfortunately, this added nothing new to my knowledge on Bonaparte, and it runs in the usual mill of the English speaking worldview upon him. I would say give this title a pass. Try reading the book by Gallo on Bonaparte instead.

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Guaranteed to put you to sleep!

Revisado: 05-22-18

I've bought several of the Great Courses audiobooks, but this, this one truly stands out among the others, and not for good reasons.
What is a fantastic and little known era of history is done a severe injustice by the monotone, dry as toast delivery of Robert Dise Jr. It would be an understatement to say that his narration comes across as being uninterested in the content of his own studies. He may as well be reading a book on tax law or the phone book. His monotone droning will probably cause your mind to wander because it just becomes background noise after a certain point. I've tried getting thru this one for months now, because it is a subject I have fervent interest in, but I have to say (with disappointment) this is the worst of the Great Courses series I've listened to. I've made it thru about 4 hours of this mess and I'll just have to set it aside and hopefully find another good audiobook on the subject.

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Unbelievable!

Revisado: 06-21-11

(mild spoiler warning!)
I've listened to almost all of the zombie novels available here. This book started out as what I thought was going to be the best written among them, going the extra step in character development where the other stories failed to do. The horror depicted with the aftermath of a series of Katrina-like storms was terrifying enough to stand on its own, even without the zombies! The big failing of the story comes when main character, a kind of dumpy middle-aged female patrol officer, in the midst of what is probably a world ending apocalypse, decides to risk the lives of herself and her surviving family members to take on some veteran hardcore seasoned SWAT team members that she believes looted some money from a submerged/ruined bank! There are mountains of drowned dead, disease, starvation, rioting, the cannibalistic zombies are running amok but unbelievably in the midst of this she gets a bee in her bonnet that 'stealing is just wrong!'

She instantly develops a skill set (along with unbelievable strokes of luck time after time) to take on the SWAT team (John McClane would be envious!) and it just really goes downhill from there. The ending was so ludicrous and out of left field that it ruined what was otherwise turning out to be my favorite zombie story from audible. Very disappointing. The narrator could have been a lot better too, because he really has no skill in portraying the female character voices.

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"Sci Fi Movie channel 'quality' writing"

Revisado: 05-14-11

In my opinion, the absolute best job of writing in the zombie horror field is "The Walking Dead" (comic series, NOT the tv show) followed probably by Max Brooks' "World War Z".
The best thing about "The Walking Dead" is that the group of survivors usually try to make sound, logical plans and then try to put them into action, but the scope of horror is so immense that things still work out for the worst. "Plague of the Dead", on the other hand, is poorly written and has to resort to just about all the characters doing the most stupid action possible (even when they are supposed to be 'the best' in their field or at least very experienced). The author tossing in a lot of medical and military jargon does not cover the fact that he/she did very little studying of how the military works and how characters this stupid would not survive long enough to make a novel-length story. For example, when the outbreak of the virus begins in Africa, the entire continent is surrounded by the forces of the world's military might. Carrier battle groups, tanks, artillery, fighter jets, bombers, attack helicopters. A sort of 'line in the sand' is drawn at the Suez canal. Certain events lead to that being the point where the hundreds of thousands of zombies choose to try to make an escape from the continent to the rest of the planet. So, what does the 'Veteran General' do? He chooses to defend this line with only a single line of riflemen. That's it. With all that military hardware he chooses just a few soldiers with a limited amount of ammo against that many zombies then he acts shocked when they are overrun within minutes. Further this General continues to make the dumbest choices possible which continuously results in more soldiers getting killed and yet none of the surviving troops desert or frag the officer like was done in Vietnam with incompetent boobs in charge. Aside from that, the story is only mildly entertaining to about the same level of watching a Sci Fi channel movie.

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By the numbers and predictable.

Revisado: 03-20-11

While better than the last two Rapp novels, this 'origin issue' could have been a lot better. It seems like Flynn has run out of ideas for Rapp and is just going through the numbers now with this series. This truly could have been much better in the character development behind the American Assassin. Instead, we get a Superman story. For example, when Rapp, immediately after being recruited by Kennedy arrives at a spy training camp in Virginia, there is nothing for him to learn. Rapp, after having done nothing more than 'taken a few months of courses at a strip mall dojo' manages to immediately and embarrassingly beat his instructor in hand to hand combat, a man who's been training Special Forces soldiers day in and out for years who also has decades of fighting experience. The rest of the time at Spy camp is spent exercising. We don't get one shred of insight as to how Rapp learns his spycraft or his great 'dirty tricks' he uses on the terrorists in the earlier novels. It only takes about 5 minutes on the gun range for the 'never been taught to shoot' Rapp to become an expert and the best shot in the service. The latter portion of the novel is Rapp's first mission in Beirut and you can already see the ending many chapters before it arrives. There just wasn't much suspense or surprises that could have been done with a little more effort from Vince Flynn. And it's a shame because I own nearly all of his books except for the last few and I know he has the talent in him.

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