John Burrus

Ok.

Revisado: 05-18-23

Not great. Don't know what all the fuss is about. (Anyone else hate not being able to just leave rating without review?)

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Major cheating

Revisado: 04-20-23

very disappointing. Author cheats with dishonest portrayal throughout of killer's thoughts. No hint until very end of true motivations. Pointless supernatural elelements.

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Very good? Maybe

Revisado: 10-15-22

My 4 star ratings are based on an assumption that it is at least largely true and does not twist narratives or omit exculpatory evidence, but the author did work for the Sun for 17 years. The Sun is far from the worst major media, but it is still part of the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, and I take with a giant box of salt anything that comes from there. The major media have done pretty much what this book claims the BPD did to now make it almost impossible for any local jury to believe anything they say. Similarly, the major media have spent decades despoiling public trust by its dishonesty and bias. So for now, I'm keeping an open mind about how much this book can be relied on as having reported the issues fully and honestly.

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Warning

Revisado: 07-21-19

To any admirers of Woodard's excellent book "American Nations" who might hope for an equally unbiased assessment of the "American Character", you are likely to be disappointed. He begins and ends by paying lip-service to the benefits of a politics properly balanced between communitarian and individual freedom concerns, but in between it seems he can find no collectivist program he doesn't support and no opposition to those programs which could possibly be based on anything other than narrow self-interest and greed. He lauds the views of such far left ideologues as Galbraith and Krugman but has nothing but distain for their ideological opponents such as Hayek, Mises, Hazlitt and Irving Kristol. In fact, he does not seem to think there is such a thing as a leftist ideologue, reserving that word only for Tea Party advocates. He excoriates the work of think tanks like AEI, CATO, The Manhattan Institute and the Hoover Institute and publications like National Review but has nothing at all to say about the virtual takeover by leftists of universities, public education, journalism and Hollywood, far left movements like moveon.org, Occupy Wall Street or Anti-fa or far left publications like The Nation. His own leftist views are on full display in the final part of the book where he outlines what he thinks is a winning 'fairness' agenda that will enable the D's (he says there is simply no hope for the R's in his unbiased opinion) to take over virtually all state and federal politics except in what he calls 'the deep south.' This is pure leftist propaganda (but he uses that word only to describe anti-collectivist efforts) masquerading as an objective view of the 'American Character' and is especially disappointing to those of us who hoped for a more helpful and less ideological effort from someone who offered just that in his first book. Sad.

I gave it two stars instead of one because in places (like his reiteration of the points made in "American Nations" and his occasional--very occasional--warnings about the left 'going too far'), he dons the guise of objectivity and purports to recognize the positive contributions of those who seek to at least slow down the country's 'progress' toward a socialist utopia, even though in most of the book he can find very few positive things to say about those persons.

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Disingenuous

Revisado: 09-21-18

The author claims to be trying to 'climb the wall of empathy' and truly understand conservatives, how we think and why we vote as we do. That claim is quickly belied by her approach as well as many early comments revealing her deeply liberal politics which apparently makes it impossible for her to approach her subject in a truly objective manner. A few of the many things she reveals in the first hour or so:
1. To conduct her study, she does not look at the writings of William F. Buckley, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, George Will, Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer, et al. Instead, she (predictably) focuses on those as far right as she can find and then proceeds to ridicule them in every way she can while pretending to be 'empathetic' to them and their politics.
2. She asserts the prevailing 'progressive' canard that the reason for the current political divide is almost, if not entirely, due to the right moving further to the right. She apparently does not know or care about the extreme drift to the left of the Democratic Party in the last 50 years or so--from Harry Truman to Maxine Waters, from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Chuck Shumer and Nancy Pelosi, from Hubert Humphrey and JFK to Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris. In short, from a Democratic Party that was anti-Communist, anti-Socialist, pro-American, pro-labor and anti-illegal immigration to one that is the opposite today and little more than a collection of 'victimized' groups who care about nothing but advancing their own separate, narrow causes and little about what is needed to benefit the country as a whole.

3. Her enlightened finding seems to be that conservatives, or at least poor and middle class conservatives, simply do not know their own interest, BUT SHE DOES.

4. She refers to her subjects as 'angry' while, at this very moment, the Democrats in the Senate are doing a full-Bork on Kavanaugh and not long after the last street riots by Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the #metoo movement and the college darlings who cannot be subjected to hearing any opinion contrary to that instilled in them by people like this.


Liberals will find this very supportive of their world views, but few conservatives will see themselves or other conservatives in the caricatures she dwells on. Anyone wanting to truly understand the left/right divide should not waste their time or money on this but should read instead Sowell's 'The Quest For Cosmic Justice' and 'A Conflict of Visions', Haidt's
'The Righteous Mind' or Murray's 'Coming Apart.' I won't be holding my breath.

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Mistitled

Revisado: 09-21-18

Should be called 'So you want to hear a bunch of diatribes by an angry black neo-Marxist.'

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BE FOREWARNED

Revisado: 09-21-18

If you buy this thinking it is a crime/detective novel, you may be disappointed. Whereas almost all modern novels of that type have some sort of romantic back-story, this one is primarily a romance novel with a crime/detective subplot. It is well-written and very well narrated, but I wish I had had a clearer idea of its true genre before buying it.

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Breathless Brick

Revisado: 04-02-18

A few years ago, Scott Brick made major changes to his narrative style that now make him tolerable, if not totally enjoyable, to listen to. Before that, and for this one, he was annoyingly overdramatic, with virtually every sentence being read in a breathless world weary or inappropriate awe-inspired manner. And Baldacci certainly improved his writing after this first break-out novel. But it's worth a listen.

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A Muddled Mess

Revisado: 09-11-17

I've been a Craig Johnson fan from the beginning. The first 8 or so were excellent, but he has been steadily sliding downhill for the last few years and now he has reached the bottom. There are too many things to list in regard to the many flaws of this confusing, time-jumping work--false clues, needless subplots, little humor, withheld information, improbable events, etc. The few other reviewers who share my disappointment have named others, but the worst is that this has no real conclusion and ends up being just a prologue to his next one--one that I don't plan to waste my time on.

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A big hole and several inconsistencies

Revisado: 08-31-17

If this had been a stand-alone novel, I probably would have given it something closer to a 4, but there are just too many inconsistencies between this one and the prior ones in the BB series and a big hole in all of them. In the last one, set 10 years before, Waring had moved to Alexandria after her husband died, her son is 4 and her daughter has just been born. In this one, she is said to have moved to McLean after his death (Alexandria is never mentioned), her son is just about to go to college and her daughter is in high school. Waring apparently doesn't recall that she spent a whole evening with BB in the last one because she doesn't recognize him in their early meetings and never recalls that prior evening with him in their numerous other meetings. Didn't Perry or his editors bother to read the prior ones before publishing this?

Apart from the inconsistencies (there are others), there is one big hole in this one and the others: why does BB, the master of everything relating to his trade, never even consider plastic surgery or at least a disguise? He just walks around large cities and into mob meetings and seems to bump into everyone he ever knew 20 or 30 years ago, all of whom (except Waring) recognize him instantly.

But it's still enjoyable in a sort of Joe Pike/Jason Bourne sort of way and the narrator is excellent.

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