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Violence of Action

Violence of Action

List Price: $7.99
Your Price: $7.19
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Marcinko still politically correct
Review: ah. The warrior for the State. Marcinko and his big government, Politically correct Navy warriors now re-write the Turner Diaries by standing the plot on its head.
Distasteful stuff no matter which point of view is scrutinized.
Each uses personnel prejudices to justify torture and murder.

Please. Does anyone nowadays really believe White Supremacists are a threat to nuke America?
More like they are the only boogey man left that you can slay without bringing down the wrath of the PC Navy pencil necked geeks who hand out those security contracts.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Find out what he's drinking
Review: Always a timely story with a now age-defying hero, Marcinko is back -- this time working for a duplicitous President. He seeks a renegade retired Special Forces colonel whose men are as well trained as his own. The colonel wants to start a general race war to benefit his white supremacist gang and army of sympathisers. He has stolen a suitcase nuclear bomb ... and you can guess the rest. One of the better Marcinko books.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Marchinko¿s Best Book since Rogue Warrior
Review: Anybody thinking Dick Marchinco had become an anachronism got a wake-up call on 9/11 of last year. Arguably, that included Marchinco himself, since his recent books, while still lots of fun to read, had become formula-driven - not really the work of a man feeling himself in tune with his times. However, with Violence in Action, Demo Dick is back with us in lethal force, invigorated once again with the purpose of his life. It's the best book he's produced since the original Rogue Warrior appeared more than a decade ago. While the distinctive Rogue voice will be recognizable to readers of this series, many of the formulaic elements are diminished or gone - the rambling asides, the sarcastic portraits of inept bureaucrats, the convoluted accounts of global detective work, punctuated by stylized bursts of action, as Dick and his boys unravel some new terrorist conspiracy. Violence of Action, in contrast, proceeds without digression, like a cannon shot from page one to the end. Surprisingly, Marchino chooses not to exploit the mood of the times here to cast Islamic militants as his villains. His Bad Guys are American white supremacists who spout mystical gibberish about Yahweh and have seized a nuclear device with which they plan to incinerate Portland, Oregon. Moreover, they're not only home-grown Americans, but former Navy Seals - blood brothers to Dick - who have drifted way off the reservation and betrayed everything he holds holy. The fury with which he hunts them down is unprecedented in anything he's written. There's a graphic torture scene early in the book that I could have done without and that most readers will find abhorrent. However, Dick doesn't revel in the ugly business - he simply describes it - and he seems to be making a philosophical point of sorts, since the information extracted from one thug's pain, in the end, saves the lives of half a million or so innocents. Ironically, in this most furious of his books, Marchinco seems finally to have wrapped his testosterone-addled brain around the idea of females in the military: both the fiercest warrior on his new combat team, and his new boss, whom he honestly respects, are women. Who says that Old Rogues are set in their attitudes? Anyone who reads Marchinco either loves him or hates him - he destroys all middle ground. His fans will be enthralled by this book, and to them I recommend it.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Entertaining but implausible
Review: Having divested himself of former colloborator John Weisman, Richard Marchinko apparently believes that he has freed himself from the need of maintaining even a pretense of plausibility to his unabashedly self-aggrandizing adventure series. Ignoring all of the real challenges involved in actual interrogation, his plot is dependent upon the proposition that crude physical brutality will extract accurate information from terrorists as quickly and easily as their testicles. Why it would not occur to his fanatical enemies to avoid pain and yet not compromise their comrades by simply lying through their teeth is not explained. But as ignorant as Marchinko appears to be of legitimate intelligence work, he is more so of Washington politics, as illustrated by a ludicrous scene in which he purports to blackmail President Bush into letting himself be ordered around like a deckhand. Nevertheless, Violence of Action is a good read, and the loving descriptions of vicious firefights ring just as true as the remainder of the book does not.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: I want to like it, but it's garbage
Review: I loved Rogue Warrior and Red Cell, but the series has declined since then, with this last book being a massive nose dive. I see that Weismann is no longer contributing (or doing all the work as it may be), and this book definitely had a different feel. It could be Marcinko wrote it and, no offense, isn't a good writer, or more plausibly, it's another writer trying to be like Marcinko and failing miserably. Marcinko is still the man, which is why I'm pissed about this book being crap, it sullies his name.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Different, but worth reading
Review: In many ways, this is Marcinko's most sophisticated novel to date. The language, the wordplay, the tone, all demonstrate a level of intelligence previously unseen in Marcinko's books.

I think the thing I found lacking in this book is the sense of authorial maturity that Weisman may have imparted to the earlier Rogue Warrior books. I don't mean that the story is immature or that Marcinko is immature, but that Marcinko seems to lack experience as a sole author -- something that I expect will change as Marcinko continues to author his books by himself. However, that's not to say the book is poorly written or that it's not a good read. In short, if you enjoyed the previous Rogue Warrior novels, odds are you'll enjoy this one, too.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: The Demise of Demo Dick?
Review: It's aptly named; violence is all it's about. There is none of the finesse, characterizations or political subtleties that made the previous Rogue Warrior novels, co-authored by John Weisman, so entertaining and - yes - uplifting.
Marcinko is a bona fide warrior - a BTDT whose two non-fiction books, Leadership Secrets, and Strategies for Success, are permanent installations in my home library. His original book, Rogue Warrior, the autobiography, is another keeper - one of the most inspirational and motivating I've ever read.
Unfortunately, Violence of Action makes a mockery of all that went before. It's cartoonish in its simplicity, gratuitously violent without any redeeming qualities, and mouthily preachy without being the least bit inspiring. When one of Demo Dick's teammates died, in prior books, you really cared... about them, their families, the SEAL community. Not so in Violence of Action; I kept wishing someone would shoot either the characters or me and put me out of my misery.
I am crazy about Commander Richard Marcinko. I have the utmost respect for all that he's accomplished, all that he's survived, and the kind of life he's lived. Yes, he's rough around the edges and I probably wouldn't want to bring him home to meet my mother, but he also has the courage of his convictions, which is rare today.
Please don't judge his abilities by this book; it is NOT a good representation (although a lot of his detractors would say it is) of the Rogue Warrior character. There is none of the self-deprecating humor found in the earlier works.
It begs the question whether Mr. Weisman was the driving force behind the other bestsellers.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Concealed Warning In This Story
Review: OK, other reviews may discuss the style of Richard Marincko's book. And the action in the story may occasionally make a thinking reader skeptical or disgusted. However, I believe that there is a concealed point to the story: It is a model story that could apply to many cities instead of only a threat to Portland Oregon, the target city.

The story opens in Washington DC. A white supremacy group kills a famous jurist who is thought to favor blacks, Jews and equality. When Capt. Marcinko and his people get called in hours later, they suddenly spot one of the bad guys still in the neighborhood to assess the aftermath of the murder. Now this is a lucky, mind-stopping coincidence, is it not? But the whole remainder of the story depends on this unlikely sighting, because it leads to the man's capture, interrogation and the further responses of Marcinko's team. This is an indication of how a real investigation would be going nowhere unless there is a big mistake by the terrorists.

Much later in the story, the group is transporting a stolen nuke into Portland by river. Of course the M-team stops them, after a lot of carnage to both sides. But think a little larger, and it suddenly becomes apparent how the water avenue is wide open in many other cities. Here is a short list of American cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Honolulu, and even Chicago, Memphis and others.

This story is a parable. It shows the danger to one city directly, and many others indirectly. There are all sorts of vulnerabilities in the world, especially by water. If there is ever a nuke threat, I hope the real response teams get as lucky as they did in this novel!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Concealed Warning In This Story
Review: OK, other reviews may discuss the style of Richard Marincko's book. And the action in the story may occasionally make a thinking reader skeptical or disgusted. However, I believe that there is a concealed point to the story: It is a model story that could apply to many cities instead of only a threat to Portland Oregon, the target city.

The story opens in Washington DC. A white supremacy group kills a famous jurist who is thought to favor blacks, Jews and equality. When Capt. Marcinko and his people get called in hours later, they suddenly spot one of the bad guys still in the neighborhood to assess the aftermath of the murder. Now this is a lucky, mind-stopping coincidence, is it not? But the whole remainder of the story depends on this unlikely sighting, because it leads to the man's capture, interrogation and the further responses of Marcinko's team. This is an indication of how a real investigation would be going nowhere unless there is a big mistake by the terrorists.

Much later in the story, the group is transporting a stolen nuke into Portland by river. Of course the M-team stops them, after a lot of carnage to both sides. But think a little larger, and it suddenly becomes apparent how the water avenue is wide open in many other cities. Here is a short list of American cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Honolulu, and even Chicago, Memphis and others.

This story is a parable. It shows the danger to one city directly, and many others indirectly. There are all sorts of vulnerabilities in the world, especially by water. If there is ever a nuke threat, I hope the real response teams get as lucky as they did in this novel!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not the best
Review: The acronyms needed translation like in the other books and Trace Dahlgren was too badass a character for my taste. Also the fact that Marchinko was the romantic lead with every female in the book was a little far fetched.


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