By the Rivers of Babylon

Rating:
Summary: Hijacked Concorde crashes in ancient Babylon...
Review: Nelson Demille's "By the Rivers of Babylon" is a military thriller from the late 1970's. The basic premise involves an Israeli peace delegation flying to New York on two Concordes, only to be hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. When they crash land on the ancient site of Babylon, the small group of men and women, with only a handful of weapons, but a strategic defensive advantage, makes a stand against a superior force.

Aside from some of the obvious dating due to historical changes during the past twenty-five years, this book works surprisingly well. Of course, a plane load of Israelis crashing in Iraq during the past few years would have met a different fate.

Several things make this story work: The first is the pacing and orchestration of the action scenes. Demille proves adept and building action, juggling multiple sequences and moving us forward on this roller coaster ride. For example, when they first crash, they have only a small contingent of security men, but one happens to have an M-14 with a starlight scope, and he is able to become an effective sniper to hold off the initial advance. But the stakes are always high, and with each attack the defenders are pushed closer to the brink.

Another thing that works is that the characters are strong enough to hold our interest. Most are not fully developed, but the two key players, Jacob Hausner and Miriam Bernstein, are dynamic and create an emotional core. Hausner is the head of El Al airline security who must deal with his own sense of failure, internal power struggles, and desire to eradicate his nemesis, Ahmed Rish. Rish, the leader of the terrorists, is the brilliant but insane leader of the Palestinians.
Miriam Bernstein is one of the leaders of the Peace Delegation, who undergoes significant changes in her relationships and viewpoints on the peace process.

Along the way, there are various heroes who rise to the occasion, such as the pilot, David Becker, the intelligence man, Isaac Burg, the American operative, McClure, General Dobkin, F-14 pilot Teddy Laskov and a host of others.
It's definitely a pot boiler that you won't want to put down.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Started promising, but quickly declined into to utterly unbelievable action sequences with no basis in reality. I tried my best to suspend disbelief for sake of the story, but it was just not worth the outcome. The heroine was so strange and conflicted that she actually became an annoying distraction. The `hero' was anything but. By the time the book was in the last pages I felt I was reading an anti Arab propaganda pamphlet. All that could have been forgiven had the novel not gone off on such unrealistic tactical and dramatic flights of fancy. It became a cartoon by the end. The author had written much better novels since this effort.

Rating:
Summary: Fast paced, action filled and hopefully not timeless
Review: DeMille became one of my favorite authors with just one book, The Gold Goast, and oddly enough, that book is quite a bit different from the main genre of the rest of his work which tends to be more military/police/spy type thrillers. After reading several of his recent books, I finally got a chance to go back many years and read this one.

I'll get my one main complaint out of the way, it's the fact that the book has a plethora of characters and I wasn't ever really sure who I was rooting for specifically. As it turns out, the protagonist if you will, is probably the group as a whole, they banded together and survived as a group (even though some of the characters were lost). I guess I can accept that, although I prefer the strong male leads that dominate all the subsequent works by DeMille that I've read.

Even though written nearly three decades ago, not much has changed in world politics and this novel could probably take place in reality tomorrow with only a few minor changes. I often wonder if world security forces go through fiction, after all, Tom Clancy wrote about a pilot flying a jet plane into the White House and later when it was tried for real, everyone acted like "nobody could have ever imagined that". In any case, this book and DeMille's The Lions Game, both have airplanes being terrorized in different and unique ways, I hope someone is taking notice.

As for the why I give this book a strong recommendation, and why I'm sticking with five stars in spite of my complaint, it's a page turner, fast paced and well written, it has military science, love, war, hate and a whole lot more.



Rating:
Summary: So Much Time Has Passed and Yet . . .
Review: I ran across this book while getting my house ready to sell. I saw that it had a 1975 copyright date and wondered if, while all that has gone on in the region since then, whether I would find it an interesting read. I believe it's timeless. If we don't delve more into the background of this conflict we'll never have an inkling of what it's about (even when we do so we may not!). At any rate it's a good book and I was riven by it

Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: After reading The General's Daughter I wanted to give Demille another read since I enjoyed it so much. I was not disappointed. At first I was thinking....man this is not my cup of tea. Peace talks, middle east, history, military talk. But before I got anywhere even near 1/2 way through I was caught. I grew to love and hate the main characters. Demille throws in enough history that the reader gets all the irony of where they are being held captive at. Sure some parts dragged and were a bit on the technical side, but overall this is a great read.