This book is horrible. The action is laughable.The main characters are portrayed as near supermen. David Robbins must be stupid.

Once again the reviewer from New York has attacked
a Robbins novel with a simplistic insult.
The truth of the matter is that these two books are much more than the sum of their parts. Yes, there is plenty of action, and yes, as always, there is plenty of humor, and yes, as always, plenty of suspense. But both are some more. MEMPHIS RUN, for instance, is a scathingly humorous dig at 'Elvismania'.
As with most of Mr. Robbins books, you have to look a little deeper than the print on the page to fully appreciate his wit and insights.

This is one the best books I've read. The action is nicely complimented by Hickok's humor. David Robbins ties all of the series in well with references to other books that you can't resist looking into. I highly recomend it.

This book was purportedly well researched. Well, maybe while the author was collecting data on weapons of mass destruction, he forgot to read up on how people really speak and act. The characters in this book were overblown caricatures of every other player you've ever read about in the spy-thriller genre: Deranged villain seeking to extract revenge on government for cancelling his top secret research project battles noble, selfless, widower hero who can withstand all injuries to outwit villain and still fall in love with beautiful, gutsy, blackbelt heroine who fights the good 'ol boy network to earn her place on the team. Need I go on?

Also, this may be a nit, but the author lost all credibility with me in the first chapter, when he stated that the weight lifters from Uzbekistan had won several medals at the World Track and Field Championships. Sorry Max, there are no weightlifting events at the World Track and Field Championsips. That error is fairly obvious - Track and Field is not Nuclear Physics - God knows what else he got wrong.

I have never been a fan of counter-terrorist type international thrillers, but this novel's intricate plot of potential mass devastation at the Olympic Games is truly riveting. The author combined accessible technical direction with a clearly plausible plot and fallable yet magnetic characters. When coupled against the back drop of one of our most cherished international events, these "improvised nuclear devices" and "pure fusion" concepts are as staggering as they are sobering.

Red Mercury; Book Review By C. L. Staten - ERRI Senior Analyst (ENN) Another in a series of several excellent counter-terrorist novels recently caught this author's eye and was quickly devoured by this inquiring mind. The book, "RED MERCURY", tells an increasingly more believable tale of fissile material stolen from the super-secret Soviet city of Chelyabinsk-65. It then follows the international trail of the atomic agent as it moves towards Atlanta and a nuclear attack on the Olympic Games. Along the way, we learn about the Nuclear Emergency Response Team (NEST) and our fictional former SpecOps leader, Mack McFall. Add a female karate back-belt as head of a special FBI CT "Javelin" HRU team and mix with some deranged and vindicative paramilitary bombers. Finally, factor in a frantic search for the possibility of a material called "Red Mercury," a pure fusion nuclear material, that could destroy Atlanta and a large part of the Eastern Seaboard. The book is filled with many authentic details (and some purposely fictionalized) about Atlanta, the Olympics and its security arrangements, and the nation's leading counterterrorist forces. It focuses on the fearsome possibility of the use of a improvised nuclear weapon of mass destruction (WMD), which contains the here before illusive "pure fusion" combination of radioactive materials that give it, its name, "RED MERCURY." The book, written by "Max Barclay", a believed pseudonym of an S. California investigative journalist, provides an extensive number of references and the names of resource persons who contributed to the effort. All in all, we would have to give it an A- and recommend it to members of the emergency, military, and intelligence community. Because of its fast pace, it admittedly is one of those books that you could pick up and find hard to put down until the dramatic ending.

The Book had a good Plot. The way the characters where represented where horrible. You should have gotten to know them better, the author should have spent more time on the description of the characters personalities, and details of the story then just concentrating on the plot.

Horton Foote is everything that today's culture is not -- thoughtful, sensitive, insightful. His works are rich, but can be accessed only by taking the time to listen and reflect, skills not well practiced these days (as evidenced by the dimwitted reviewer of the previous entry). If you cannot see his plays, please read them slowly and carefully (Both 'The Young Man from Atlanta' and 'The Last of the Thortons' are excellent choices) and the rewards will be tremendous.

Dramatic writers are like orchestral conductors; advancing age serves to enhance the talents of the truly gifted in their ranks. Octogenerian Horton Foote, who imprinted the visual memory of the 1960's generation with his screen adaptation of Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird", won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for "The Young Man from Atlanta". In this one-act drama, Foote embeds within a structure of six simple scenes a gentle and unsettling tale of 1950's Houston. Will Kidder is the 65 year-old man from Houston whose fortunes grew up with the city -- his prosperity always rendered in large cash sums. "Because I want the best. The biggest and the best. I always have." -- Will alerts co-worker Tom early in the first scene, unaware that he addresses his replacement at the firm he's helped build for almost four decades. Will's simple hope is that constructing the city's biggest house for his highly strung but deeply religious wife Lily Dale will help her overcome the peculiar death of their only child. Non-swimmer son Bill's short stroll into a Florida lake has bequeathed a void to the couple's life along with a young companion from Atlanta -- the never-seen title character -- whose calls Will avoids even as he forbids the grieving mother further contact with the visitor. With the opening of the second scene, Lily Dale, unaware of her husband's firing, occupies her place in their large new house, but the hoarding of her grief and the baggage of her relationship with the unseen Atlantan occupy her thoughts. She confides to her step-father Pete that she has funneled to the stranger most of seventy-five thousand dollars accumulated from Will's past Christmas gifts in gratitude for his comforting testimony about her son's religious devotion at the Atlanta boarding house where they were roommates. Also, Lily Dale -- whose very name conjures proper Southern Baptist assemblages, floral hats, and lily-covered caskets -- admits that she has responded with m! onetary pity to her son's friend's stories of life without loving family. She prays Will himself can come to accept the young man from Atlanta as an important part of her son's life. Then Will admits to her the loss of his job. Discovery that Pete's own nest egg cannot replace the money given to the stranger as outright gift (for now Will needs funding to start a new business) -- along with knowledge that the one hundred thousand dollars Will gave their son over the years is no longer accounted for -- undermines the household's tranquillity. "You've been taken for a fool, woman." Will cries on the way to his heart attack. It is the couple's groping toward "truth telling" to one another that gives impetus to the drama, even as they deal with the more mundane matters of recovering financial stability and failing health. Horton Foote's mid-century characters in "The Young Man from Atlanta" embody a "memory" of American Southern propriety that dared not openly allude to situations outside of prevailing social norms. The preservation of privacy and its refusal to examine reality from different perspectives enabled construction of a societal fortress that defied plundering, even if substantial financial and emotional resources were at stake. As long as the resources remained intact -- or seemingly so -- the Will Kidders could continue functioning as they desired, while deluding themselves into the bargain. "Will Kidder" was a perfect name for the old man from Houston.

This is my first P.T. Deutermann novel. It started out a little bit slow but was rich in background. By the time I reached the back cover I felt I knew my way around a DRMO. The story line is believable, current and frightening. By the end this book was moving like an inbound rocket. I definitely recommend it and will be looking for other Deutermann titles.

Deutermann's other books would benefit by offering a tear-out Navy acronym cheat-sheet. This one is shy of acronyms. Wow, what a story! Deutermann has a great gift for narrative and the ability to paint rich, believable characters. Dave Stafford, the principal character, is the only one who doesn't come off as a butt covering macho bureaucrat. Highly recommended to anyone who likes believable action yarns.

What more can I say?...This book had interesting characters, believable actions, and a story-line that captures and holds your interest. I listened to the unabridged audiobook version and you simply cannot beat reader "Dick Hill" for drawing the listener into a book. He's my favorite. This was my first P.T. Deutermann book -- and it prompted me to pick up another of his. An excellent author and book!

The thing I enjoyed most about this book was the pace of the story. It didn't drag on and on with pages of boring details. Even though it was a fairly quick read, there was enough information about people's surroundings, the family connections, etc., to make it interesting and hold the reader's attention. As for the whodunnit, that was fairly easy to figure out, but it didn't take away from the book. I will definitely take the time to read more books by this author.

I don't usually go for such light-hearted mysteries, I prefer more gore and murder. But I picked this up after a friend recommended it to me, and I was not disappointed. Having grown up in and around Atlanta my whole life, it was fun to read the fictional events and actually picture where they were taking place. I could just see where the murder occured, where Callihan lived and ate, where her relatives lived. I guess that was the most appealing thing about this book. You may have to live in Atlanta to truly like it.

That said, the story was quick and interesting. You know almost from the beginning 'whodunnit', but keep reading to see him get caught. I don't think this book was as close to the Tokars case as some may think, but there were some similarites. I picked this book up on Saturday morning and was done by the next day. I may read more of her books, if just to enjoy the local setting a bit more.

These may be considered cozies, but they have a distinct edge. The characters are fun, but also well developed, and the plots are decent. The characters and their personalities are complex. The books improve as they go along. I was panting for the last one, "Irish Eyes." I even bought the hardback. Am waiting for the next one. Begin at the beginning if you can, but not necessary.

This directory is OK if you're only interested in a few suburban counties. There are 20 counties that make up greater Atlanta, however. You can get better information, by county, by city, or by school from the Georgia Department of Education's website. It will likely be fresher data; most importantly, it will cost you nothing.

As a person moving to Atlanta from another part of the country, this book proved to be a great source of information. Would recommend this to anyone moving to Atlanta or deciding where to move to so their children will be placed in a great school.

When we lived in Atlanta this book provided some great ideas on places to go visting. But I never felt if provided the richness I might have hoped for, and we were occassionally dissapointed in the locations. If you are new to town, I would pick this up.

This is a great book to get know Atlanta. Most of the walks are 5 miles or less. The book has lots of maps and points of interest. I found it fun to walk and bike Atlanta when I first moved here. Great gift for someone moving or new to Atlanta

I was hoping for a factual/investigative account of the tragedy of the Atlanta child murders. Instead, this book seemed to be an essay written on the problems of racial injustice and ignorance in Atlanta, America, and the world. Nothing wrong with that, but then I take into account that the essay was written in a most meandering and disjointed fashion, full of incomprehensible references, with an overwhelming tone of arrogance. Baldwin is right, everyone else is wrong and to blame. Not persuasive, just a waste of time.

This is a difficult read because Baldwin's thoughts come across like a man too perplexed to ask "Why?". And so there are many crosscurrent thoughts, parentheticals that are not in parenthesis, and sheer rage. The question: who could be murdering the children in Atlanta? And has the years of systematic oppression and racism made it possible for a black man to be become that cruel? Has the oppressed become the oppressor?

And I can understand Baldwin's great perplexity...he wants to point the finger at the American way of life. How years and years of being considered not human has affected the mindset of the average person of color. And of having to come through identity crises, legal crises, social crises to be confronted with who...? A person who is this insane enough to be killing innocent kids? Why have we struggled so much, Baldwin seems to be asking, to create this monster?

And so, it is another probing we received from the always philosophical, questioning, always provocative Baldwin.

Why read the book now? Well, although this murderer has been found and given punishment based on the fullest extent of the law, the questions remains.

How have we come to this?

David Mamet is certainly an excellent story-teller and an accomplished writer. No one can take that away from him.

But this story - which in Mamet's mind is intended to combat bigotry and racism toward Jews - actually enhances bigotry and racism toward other groups that are being marginalized in current American society.

Mamet gives us a story where an innocent Jewish man is mistakenly convicted of rape and suffers a harrowing fate at the hands of a lynch mob. Mamet tells us that this happened because of anti-Semitism. Fair enough.

Mamet's character then goes on to deliver a two-fisted verbal assualt on Christians of the "evangelical" variety ("they say they've been saved. Saved from what?"), who he portrays as evil, stupid, and lazy. (They bask in "inherited glory," although they've contributed nothing to society, "invented no vaccines," as Mamet puts it.)

First of all, there is no evidence that the historical killers in this case were "evangelical Christians." It's a big stretch to say that just because a murder occurred in the south, that it was committed by Bible-thumping Southern Baptists.

Second, "evangelical Christians" comprise about 7 to 10 percent of the current American population (a number that is consistently revealed in polls by Gallup, Barna, Smith, etc.). That's about the same as the number of Jews and Muslims in America combined. They are consistently villified as "right-wingers" who want to take over the government, impose a theocracy, and kill homosexuals - none of which is true. (The typical evangelical is a moderate Republican of the John McCain variety.) Aside from the rather sympathetic portrayal of Ned Flanders on the Simpsons, the entire media establishment is arrayed against this one segment of our population. The lies and stereotypes directed against these people are as pernicious and hateful as those directed against the Jews in Nazi Germany. (The Jews, too, were out to take over society, according to the Third Reich.) Mamet's hateful scree against people "who say they've been saved" is just fuel for the fire. It takes a feeble-minded coward to throw himself wholeheartedly into society's accepted mode of bigotry, and well, Mamet lives up.

Third, evangelicals are hardly stupid people who bask in "inherited glory" from the Pilgrim days. Evangelical accomplishments are many - from revolutionizing the field of linguistics (Kenneth Pike) and Philosophy (Alvin Plantiga), to improving the lives of millions of Latin Americans after the abysmal failure of Roman Catholicism to confront oppression and injustice, to helping freedom of religion and freedom of speech spread throughout the globe, Evangelicals have contributed much to modern society. Of course, they haven't contributed much to the Entertainment industry, and perhaps that's the only industry Mamet cares about.

In The Old Religion, historical figure Leo Frank, a Jewish factory owner in the old American South falsely accused of rape and murder, then imprisoned and eventually lynched by an organised mob, is turned by Mamet into a religious philosopher, an all but obssessive turner over of truths and half truths, propositions and the voices within voices of a disputatious mind from a disputatious people. But the heart of it is still the same: "To be a man," the Rabbi said, was to behave as a man in that situation where there were neither the trappings nor the rewards of manhood: scorned, reviled, abandoned, humiliated, powerless, terrified, mocked. "Now be a man..." the Rabbi said."

And in The Edge, a movie by Mamet, the millionaire played by Anthony Hopkins is an obssessive learner and compiler of facts, a man detached from his emotions, who through the forces of a melodrama plot, (a plane goes down stranding him in the wilderness with his wife's lover, the fashion photographer Alec Baldwin who wants him dead) is forced to confront himself and, stripped to his essentials, survive. In a sense, The Edge is the opposite story to The Old Religion in that the former has as its central motif a canoe paddle on whose two sides a rabbit and a ravenous beast, I cannot quite recall what, co-exist. Why is the rabbit not afraid? "Because he knows he's smarter then the.." Fox, I believe the beast is. It is significant that the line, among the best in the film, is not quite memorable enough to hold the mind. And the central, memorable sequence of the film is millionaire and adulterous rival being forced to collaborate in killing a bear. That bear was more memorable than the characters or the dialogue. In The Old Religion the opposite moral is operative, Frank is in no useable way smarter than his employee Jim, who uses the white Southern mob's unwillingness to believe in the intelligence of a "nigro" to fool them and gets away with murder, dooming the outsider Jew. You cannot be smarter than the fox and disruptive nature, chaos; the forces of darkness cannot be conquered - you must only stand and face them as you may, that is the true heart of Mamet's reveries.

The trouble is that this does not always amount to a compelling fulcrum, in and of itself, it must accompany colour or is bland, a blank stare in the face of onrushing doom - Mamet's stoic glance in the face of the cancer look.

In The Old Religion, Frank's habits of dissecting, homelitically commenting on and generally discoursing throughout and over every event of his downward course lend the book the air of a series of absent minded sermons, underpinned with occasional colourful clues as to motive, projection through space and narrative to fate, the taste of life. As Mamet points out somewhere in his book of actors' sermons "True or False"- intentions are not interesting, a person's qualities are not interesting, only actions are interesting. Hence the only memorable thing about the Rabbi, a key figure of the last third of the book, is the way he lights a match, his way with a cigarette. This is actual character. Mamet doesn't give either Frank or the Rabbi or any of the other characters quite enough internal colour, a personal smell or feeling, to make them anything - an actor could not successfully play them without addition and a reader cannot happily create them in the mind's eye because aside from the endless discourses- as Mamet's Frank asks himself at one point "what part of reason is not simply the recoil of fear?" - there is nothing much going on. The only thing which defines Frank's response in the face of the onrushing catastrophe is his reversion to the "Old Religion" of Judaism away from the "Old Religion" of the South, of America, of the belief in progress. This is not really, in itself, much that you can play. As Mamet the actor would put it: What's the objective? And it cannot really be said that Mamet the novelist has given the actor or reader much in the way of lines on a page to sustain the illusion of character.

At the novel's early parts, before chaos unfolds, one feels a little like the inhabitant of a Aharon Appelfeld novel, where bitter laughter and irony is beneath every casual detail of the lives of comfortable Jews on the lip on an abyss. And Mamet's skill is always wordily present - for probably two thirds of the novel he manages to keep you reading, keep you turning the pages, despite very little meat between his odd moments of concrete detail. This is no small skill. But his aesthetic position about acting is disproved in his own work, in this particular book. Not enough blood in these characters to sustain the book.

I love David Mamet's plays (recently, I laughed my way through the movie adaptation of State and Main), but this novel was disappointing. The event itself (described on the book jacket) is much more interesting than a fragmented interior monlogue by a less-than-fascinating protagonist. The idea invoked The Stranger, but unlike Camus who does a brilliant job, Mamet is much less brilliant. This read more like a literary experiment in a writing workshop than a polished piece by Mamet. If you want to read the master of this genre, stick to Camus.

I plowed through Bambara's huge book on the subject of the Atlanta child murders - and I stuck with it out of a loyalty to two of my favorite writers: Bambara and Toni Morrison. It was beautifully written in parts and very tedious in others. My question is this: what happens at the end? I don't get it. Whose voice does Zala hear inside that causes her to rush into Gitten's house. I really have puzzled over this. Clues?

... Zala Spencer has waited up all night for Sonny, her 12-year-old, to come home. Lately he's been hard to manage, but he's never stayed out overnight, and this morning she won't let him stroll in and talk his way around her. As Zala paces the house, she represses the knowledge currently terrifying Atlanta's black community: this summer its children, one by one, are being murdered. Thus readers enter the life of a fictional family whose son disappears during the Atlanta child killings of 1979-1981, when 29 black youths were slain.

Author Toni Cade Bambara was living in Atlanta at the time of the murders, and after several children's bodies were found but officials seemed unconcerned, she began keeping a journal. She filled twelve notebooks, which she spent more than a decade revising into a historical novel. By the time she died in 1995, she had drafted an imposing manuscript, animated by her vexed fascination with America's latest racial Catch-22: that blacks who suspect authorities of prejudice are paranoid, or themselves prejudiced, because our society is now color-blind.

Bambara isn't a one-sided social critic. "Those Bones Are Not My Child" blames black communities for their quietism after the Civil Rights movement: "The ballot secured, reps in office, … folks had laid down their weapons in the public square and sauntered off to read the papers." In Bambara's view all Americans today are chasing the good life instead of social justice. Still, in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981, hundreds of black citizens became activists like Bambara's protagonist, Zala. Weary from the difficulties of raising Sonny in a world dangerous to black males, and now traumatized by his disappearance, Zala is feisty, too. She and her husband join STOP, a group of parents trying to energize a lukewarm, lagging investigation into the killings.

Readers are plunged into the daily round of a community in crisis whose situation is ignored, misunderstood, or exploited by powers-that-be. STOP urges civic leaders to declare a public emergency - something is menacing Atlanta's children, even if it's not an organized vendetta against black youth. But the official view is that systematic or racist violence can't happen in "the city too busy to hate." Stories about serial killings would be bad PR for an Atlanta ambitious to be a world-class location for corporations, conventions, even a future Olympics. Zala finds it infuriating that the minimal publicity given the case treats the parents as primary suspects. Worse, when evidence clears the parents, officials speculate that the children were narcotics runners murdered by ghetto druglords, or runaways from family poverty and neglect who met with fatal accidents.

Bambara shows that when citizens can't trust authorities to be diligent or impartial, rumors multiply. Someone in the black community hears that whites are kidnapping their boys to use in porn films and snuff flicks, but that all evidence implicating whites is being suppressed. Others say that an official deliberately lost a recording of a Klansman's boasts about participating in the murders. Still others insist that the 1980 explosion in a black daycare center that killed four children must be from KKK dynamite, not a flaw in the building's ancient boiler. The arrest of a black man looks like a predictable gambit in a white cover-up, especially because now newspapers jump to give the case daily front-page prominence at last.

Small wonder that Atlanta's black community comes to view the trial of the accused man, Wayne Williams, as a white frame-up. Williams is charged with two killings and convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence, mainly fibers found on the bodies of victims. According to the grapevine, Caucasian hairs were also found but prosecutors ignored that detail, and they apply the fiber evidence to the other murders only because they want all the cases closed even if a killer is still at large. In sum, Bambara's novel shows us what it's like to live hours, days, and years in the midst of beleaguered fear, mistrust, and indignation.

So it's an important story for all Americans, although the book is overlong - the anguish of parents as they seek their missing children, build theories, and witness official inaction is a slender plot on which to hang 600+ pages. Had Bambara lived longer, she might have cut the manuscript. She does try to heighten drama by elaborating sensory detail and starting chapters like short stories whose temporarily withheld explanations might tantalize a reader, but these strategies often prove distracting. Still, the first half of the book compels attention, and domestic scenes with the Spencer family are deft and moving throughout the narrative. The final two chapters become gripping as the mystery of Sonny's disappearance is solved.

In any case, we choose a historical novel for more than just its novelistic technique, and we can't choose a different novel on the subject - there are no others. I'm grateful that Bambara wrote the manuscript before she died and that Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison shepherded it through posthumous publication.

I found this book by accident. I went out to buy toilet rolls and bought a book that changed my life instead. Although this reads at times like a draft version with all the glitches it gives a much closer picture of Bambara's need to get this story told. It is filled with a Proustian slowness even stillness that can be overwhelming but the end result is that, for me, I can never read a book again in quite the same way. The content of the book is appalling enough but the casual, even matter of fact way in which a great deal of it is written brings the whole case into your own neighbourhood. Books are about us, they reflect a world we all inhabit and that it what makes this such an important book. Bureacracy chokes us and hides the truth from us; frustrates us. Bamabara and Morrison have produced this volume that will alter the perspective of anybody who reads it through. There is never a final answer. Such crimes can not have an easy explanation. Books of this calibre must be written and read