S. A. James

The world of Q in a nutshell

Revisado: 03-06-25

A more and more heartbreaking story of a manipulative little sociopath and the lonely, incredibly naive girl taken in by his BS. Listening to this is like the step-by-step guide to how a divorced 50 year gives $800,000 to “Brad Pitt” in Nigeria. It really is depressing how this woman in the story gets taken in by a kid who gets off on manipulating people and she gets dragged into believing there’s some greater grand design and puppet masters behind his violence. An incredibly sad story I actually had to force myself to sit through.

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Entertaining and detailed overview

Revisado: 11-05-24

I very much enjoyed this book and its treatment of firebase ripcord. Throughout much of it, it almost read like a novel grabbing and holding my attention. My only complaint is the author frequently makes a mistake of calling some of the VC/NVA‘s weapons AK50s. Honestly, it doesn’t bother me much but some of my more militantly gun nut friends would probably have an aneurysm hearing that. It’s also an odd mistake to make as the author also refers to them correctly as AK-47s. Sometimes he even refers to AK-47s and AK 50s in the same paragraph. Otherwise the book is great and I highly recommend the purchase 

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Entertaining although a bit revisionist 

Revisado: 11-05-24

Pretty good read although a more accurate title would be the Civil War in Tennessee with some expanded detail about Jack Hinson. Majority of the book deals more with general area Civil War history rather than Hinson’s life and exploits. The author could’ve cut about half of the book to make a more concise story about him but he seems to enjoy getting lost on tangents dealing with other aspects. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the frequent and long asides about other subjects can get distracting and a bit tedious.

The author also has a tendency to repeat himself or repeatedly state similar conclusions especially regarding what appears to be his opinion that slavery was a benevolent action on the Hinson familles part. Sometimes this repeating even takes part within a couple of sentences. Author rarely refers to the slaves as slaves, they are primarily referred to as servant etc. that kinda minimizes the reality of chattel slavery. That was A kind of weird position to take, although it does seem to be a popular sentiment in the south, so maybe that’s where the author originated.

The author also put a lot of effort into claiming Hinson was a strictly neutral anti-secessionist even though county voting records prove this untrue. Considering the amount of research that went into this book, I find it odd that The author never once looked at Hinson’s 1861 vote for secession. I don’t necessarily believe this fact was deliberately left out, but maybe it was or maybe the author put more stock in the family’s stories than in government records.

All in all it was a pretty decent read, especially if you’re particularly interested in the local social climate and Civil War history of the area versus strictly looking for Jack Hinson’s story. 

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Ok I’m impressed

Revisado: 06-29-24

I’m really not much of a fiction reader, This is probably one of only maybe five fiction books I’ve read this year versus dozens upon dozens on the nonfiction side. But when I saw this pop up in my Audible Plus catalog I said hey what the heck, it’ll burn a few hours. Surprisingly I got quite engrossed in this tale. The story was not overly complicated to follow and it kept my interest locked in right to the end. The author did well building the world and giving us details without devolving into long, drawn out descriptions. I actually got so engrossed in the storyline that I stayed awake a couple extra hours last night listening to it in bed. It’s even rarer for me to buy fiction books but I believe I will be buying into this one. A decent choice if you can get it cheap and it’s even more worth a listen as a free title.

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Hypotheticals detracted from the narrative 

Revisado: 05-01-24

Each chapter is broken down into the invention overview, analysis, and then two sections of hypothetical employment and a fictional narrative of the weapon in use. Personally, the stories of the weapons being used really distracted me from the factual information in the book. The fictional sections were mostly entertaining, but pretty much all of them were longer than the factual sections and I wish it was the other way around.

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Pretty standard ‘Nam memoir fare

Revisado: 04-23-24

Author and content: The book was decent enough. As far as style, content, etc. it’s more or less your average soldier in Vietnam type of stuff with various interesting vignettes. Fairly early on you realize the authors tour of duty affected him deeply and as the chapters go on that comes more and more to the forefront. I don’t know that I would go through the book a second time, but I don’t regret reading it the first time. It’s worth a listen/read if you’ve got some free time, especially if you got it on sale like I did.

Narration: Appropriate for the subject matter. Narrators voice kind of complimented the material. As with most audibles, this book was better listened to at ~2x speed because of how slow the regular narration is. Narrator talking speed is my only major complaint and that’s a consistent grievance of mine across just about every book on here that I’ve listened to. I really wish publishers would quit padding out the listening time and just have narrators talk at a normal pace.

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Decent but

Revisado: 11-11-23

Pretty good book although the last hour or so gets to be a bit of a slog

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Solid but distracting narration

Revisado: 08-21-23

Not sure why but they switch narrators on each of the books 3 seperate acts. It ended up being kind of distracting and added difficulty in following the narrative for awhile after the switch. They should’ve stuck with the female narrow used for the first part. Otherwise it was a great book

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Interesting account from an important time of the GWOT

Revisado: 11-01-22

Entertaining, engrossing and informative. I did find it kind of weird that in the forward Ranger sniper Nick Irving misstated the establishment of the modern Ranger Battalions by about a decade but that was inconsequential. Pretty cool book and I’m glad I picked it up

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Jeeeeeezus the narration is ROUGH

Revisado: 09-24-22

My God, I’m only through two or three chapters in and I already feel a need to come make a special mid-book review note about the narration style. The extremely slow, halting 2-5 word - pause - 2-5 word - pause - 2-5 word style of narrating makes this otherwise interesting tale incredibly difficult to listen to. Rarely do I bag a particular aspect of a book, I’ve only written 2 partially negative book/audiobook/etc reviews, ever and this is the second one. I’m struggling mightily to even follow the story, it’s just that distracting. Even more so at 2.0x speed where I had to set speed in order to move the narration along quick enough to even follow the story. I’m going to try to grind through because I’m really interested in the USSR whaling subject matter and it’s a rarely written subject. The writing/story is otherwise good BUT the publishers seriously need to consider having the audio re-done because as is it’s almost totally unlistenable.

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