Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

A Fresh Take on the Civil War

Harold Holzer went through the collection of the New-York Historical Society and used what he found inspired him to write The Civil War in 50 Objects. Holzer has written or edited more than forty books on Lincoln and the Civil War era, so he knows as well as anyone how hard it is to bring new perspective to our nation’s most-studied era. +Continue Reading

The Friends of James Bond

By Max Allan Collins

Editor’s Note: COMPLEX 90 was an unfinished Mike Hammer novel by Mickey Spillane that was recently completed by noted author Max Allan Collins, whom Spillane asked to finish the book before is death in 2006. In the just-released book, Hammer travels to Russia on a fact-finding mission and gets entangled in an espionage incident with the KGB. Since the novel was originally inspired by the ‘60s spy craze, Collins decided to reflect on the influence of James Bond for us.

The recent publication of COMPLEX 90 got me reflecting on that special time in the ‘60s when James Bond first exploded onto the American scene.  This is in part because I’m the lucky writer who completed Mickey Spillane’s unfinished 1964 manuscript of his “lost Mike Hammer Cold War thriller”; but also because I was in high school when Bond and the Beatles led the British Invasion, and have warm, vivid memories of the spy craze. +Continue Reading

Remembering Dad & Watching War Movies

By Dana Fresdsti

Dana Fredsti has just published Plague Nation, the sequel to her acclaimed zombie thriller Plague Town. For the last book she wrote a guest post for Under the Radar explaining the research that went into creating a realistic walking dead scenario. This time she shares some memories of her Korean War vet father and breaks down her love for war movies, even the ones that don’t always get their facts straight.

I dreamed about my father the other night.  This may not seem like much to anyone else, but my dad has been dead for three years and change and this is the first time I’ve dreamed about him since he died.  So… it was a big damn deal for me.  It was a very simple dream.  Just Dad calling and saying that while he wasn’t feeling great, there was no reason the two of us couldn’t get together, hang out and just talk.  Next minute in dreamtime, Dad and I are sitting opposite one another in these big comfy leather armchairs, reading and talking about movies we liked.  I reminded him that after reading my first zombie story A Man’s Gotta Eat What  A Man’s Gotta Eat, he told me I wrote like a drunken misogynist.  He died before Plague Town was written.  I’m not sure what he would have had to say about it, but I’m sure he would have given me hell for having someone “unholster” their M-4. +Continue Reading

Nick Cardy’s ‘The Artist at War’

Before he earned fame as the comic book artist who drew covers for Aquaman and Teen Titans in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, Nick Cardy served in WWII as an assistant tank driver in the Third Armored Division and was awarded two Purple Hearts.

The new book The Artist at War compiles a collection of sketches that Cardy made during his service in the European theater. “I carried a 3″ x 5″ spiral bound drawing pads in my duffel bag and a watercolor set and a larger pad. Whatever I could fit in there. As I went along for those three years I sketched and did watercolors.” +Continue Reading

Bin Laden from Beyond the Grave

Jeremy Fisk, the hero of Law & Order creator Dick Wolf’s new first novel The Intercept,  is a detective assigned to the NYPD’s Intelligence Division of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He’s on the team that goes through the intel pulled out of Osama bin Laden’s compound and he’s convinced that the Al Qaeda mastermind was plotting something big before the SEALs took him out. Fisk’s fears prove true after a civilian takedown of a hijacker on a plane headed for NYC turns out to be a cover for a more nefarious plot aimed at the dedication ceremony for the finally completed One World Trade Center tower. +Continue Reading

JFK the Spy

Francine Mathews’ new novel Jack 1939 invents a story where Harvard senior John F. Kennedy gets recruited by President Roosevelt to foil a Nazi plot that would rig the 1940 U.S. presidential election to elect an isolationist who wouldn’t interfere with Hitler’s plans for Europe. Jack travels to Europe to research his senior thesis (later published as Why England Slept) and tries to intercept a charity ledger that contains the names of American and British citizens who have (knowingly or unknowingly) contributed to Nazi efforts to intervene in American politics. The fact that Jack’s dad (and known FDR rival) Ambassador Joseph Kennedy is on that list gives JFK’s mission a bit more urgency.

In the course of his mission, Jack sleeps with a married woman, helps smuggle the Enigma machine out of Poland, hangs out with Churchill, stabs a Gestapo agent and secretly communicates with FDR via telegraph from rooftops all over Europe. The story works because Mathews starts with some historical facts (FDR’s problems with Kennedy Sr. and J. Edgar Hoover, JFK’s tour of Europe, the Enigma machine, Churchill’s efforts to prepare for war despite Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s utter cluelessness and the actual Nazi efforts to influence U.S. opinion via German-American groups) and imagines a spy thriller tale that forges a personal connection between two of our most popular presidents. +Continue Reading

No Easy Day: Art and OPSEC Violations

Few books have hit shelves in recent years with as much controversy surrounding them as No Easy Day.  Written under the pen name of Mark Owen by a former member of DEVGRU – better known as SEAL Team Six since the Osama Bin Laden takedown– the book is the first truly inside account of the mission that killed the chief terrorist behind 9/11.

That the book was published without the approval of the Department of Defense – something the Pentagon has made a very public spectacle out of – has created a buzz that has earned No Easy Day the kind of publicity that money can’t buy as well as the ire of a large segment of active duty troops and veterans who take their non-disclosure agreements a bit more seriously than Owen seems to. +Continue Reading

Joe Kubert, “Sgt. Rock” Illustrator, Dead at 85

MORRISTOWN, N.J. — Legendary comic book artist Joe Kubert has died of cancer in New Jersey at age 85.

Kubert  passed away Sunday in Morristown, his son Adam said. Kubert had multiple myeloma.

During a career that began as a teenager in the 1930s Kubert illustrated and wrote a wide range of titles but probably was best known – and likely will be best remembered – for his work on “Our Army at War” and “Sgt. Rock.” +Continue Reading

Major Eazy: WWII Hero for the Brits

Major Eazy is a not a character we’ve ever encountered before, but no one here at Under the Radar grew up in the UK during the ‘70s getting a comics fix from a low-budget magazine called Battle Pictures Weekly. Titan Books has set out to change all that with Major Eazy: Heart of Iron (Volume 1), a deluxe hardcover edition that compiles the story from its beginning.

Eazy looks a lot like James Coburn and brings his own car and weapons to the British invasion of Italy in 1943. The Italians are sort of beneath contempt; Eazy saves his sharpest barbs for the British brass, the Nazis and especially the Yanks. +Continue Reading

2nd RIC(A): The First, Last and Only All-Black Ranger Unit

Armies are temples of ancestor worship. Basil Liddell Hart 1944

Took this at the bookstore when I bought the book. (Note: Outlaw Platoon is superb; I’ll be writing a review of it soon.)

Ed. note: We’ve revisiting classic military books and movies here at UTR.. If any of our readers have favorites they want to share, let us know.

If Korea is, as they say, the ‘forgotten war’, how much more forgotten is a small all-black unit that fought therein?

Before I met Col. McGee I’d heard about many of the all-black and all-Japanese units from the days of military segregation, but a cursory knowledge of the Tuskegee Airmen and Redtails (largely from the movies) and some of the support units (like the Airfield Security Battalions) was about the extent of it. I certainly hadn’t realized there were still completely segregated units in Korea (Executive Order 9981 was in 1948 after all), though I probably should have. +Continue Reading