Rating: 
Summary: Great Alternate History
Review: This is one of the rare Alternate History Novels that is written like Mainstream Fiction instead of Sci-Fi. Although it is predictable, it is a fun, well written novel. Some of the possibilities that the author uses are pretty scary. The book also shows just how easy it would have been for the Cuban Missle Crisis to escalate into a war, and makes you think about how stupid it is to threaten world wide destruction over a few ideolodgical differences. There are a few corny parts with the Ronald Reagan Variety Hour and a certin Public figure leading a different civil rights march. Other than that a very entertaing read for a plane ride and stuff like that.
Rating: 
Summary: Kennedy and the Cuban crise and what well might have been
Review: I've just read a surprisingly good novel by Brendan Dubois titled RESURECTION DAY (Putnam). Just came out and is in hard cover.Surprisingly, because it's an alternate history book. The clue that it might be good is that though the novel is classifiable as science fiction it is not. (Publishers have always been reluctant to class a "good" novel as SCI-FI.) The time break in the novel is the Cuban Missile Crises. (I was in the USAF as a cryptographer at that time and remember how close we came to a blow up.) In Dubois' vision the situation does esclate into a nuclear exchange which results in the destruction of Russia and pushes it back to something resembling the Middle Ages, destroys Cuba, NYC, and Washington, D.C. and the Kennedy's. The fallout hits Europe and the US quite hard. America is no longer a major power and is being being bolstered by England. The writing is quite good. We are lead to the destruction and the effects quite subtly.The country is under the control of the military, but the depth of the control and the condition of the country sneak up on the reader. Is Kennedy really dead? What is England really up to? Here's a solid novel for summer reading. You can put it done with ease...that will give you the time to ponder. Rest assurred you will return to RESURECTION DAY. "Amazing isn't it, how wars and empires can change because of a few incidents over the course of a single day. After Lexington and Concord, what happened. All stemming from that park and this bridge." "That's true of all wars," he said. One Cuban dictator and one ambitious American president and one scared Russian premier later, look where we are."
Rating: 
Summary: Something to read while waiting for a plane or train
Review: Fairly decent "junk" reading, full of cliches (e.g. news reporter uncovering sinister conspiracies; romance between reporter and predictably beautiful, spunky, and mysterious female correspondent), and simplistic characterizations (e.g. the Globe's military censor is downright demonic, with no redeeming attributes at all). Best part of the book is its description of the hypothetical Cuban War, and its immediate aftermath as America gradually withdraws from the world scene (some sections are absolutely chilling). Unfortunately, the plot steadily unravels as it plods its way to the disappointingly predictable conclusion (which any half-intelligent reader will figure out by the first 1/3 of the book). Furthermore, too much of the story is derivative of Harris' Fatherland. But JFK adorers, former hippies clinging to the 1960s, and anyone who loses sleep over the possibility that the Redcoats will one day reconquer America will surely love the novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Surviving the Cold War and RESURRECTION DAY
Review: Congratulations, reader. You're a survivor. And like millions of others around the world, we are all survivors of the Cold War. As a child growing up in the 1960's, our house was just a few miles away from a Strategic Air Command base that hosted a wing of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers. The sight of these mammoth bombers cruising overhead just after takeoff, or preparing for a landing, was as common as bicycles dumped on green lawns, or fishing boats on the nearby rivers. During the day the bombers were a magnificent sight, cruising with absolute power and efficiency with their jet engines, as my brothers and I looked up in awe at all that force hundreds of feet overhead. For young boys, seeing these symbols of American nuclear might was irresistible At night it was a different story. Oftentimes the air base would have alerts, practice drills where the bombers would take off, one after another, as if the word had come from the White House that an attack was underway. For a young boy like myself, huddling in his bed as the jets roared over the house, over and over again in the middle of night, one thought would go through my mind: fifteen minutes. There would just be a fifteen minute warning of Soviet missiles coming in over the North Pole, just long enough to launch the B-52s, but not long enough for any other kind of warning. When you're ten years old, curled up in your blankets and sheets in a dark house, filled with the noise of jet bombers that may be screaming toward their targets, fifteen minutes can last until morning. The bombers overheard weren't the only local symbols of the Cold War being waged around the globe. Even as a young boy, I read the newspaper articles and the stories in Life magazine about the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. I took out books from the city library about civil defense and fallout. My older brothers told me that a few years earlier, they had all been fingerprinted, not in case they were abducted -- no, nothing as simple as a kidnapping. No, my brothers had been fingerprinted, so if the air base had ever been attacked, their bodies could be identified from the rubble of their school. I saw the signs at the city hall and the post office, identifying the fallout shelters. And so I grew up, learning in schools about math and history and grammar, and learning more from my environment: blast zone, MIRV'ed warheads, ABM systems. And in a sense, both educations prepared for the world I was entering, a world that had been shaped by the great struggle between the West and the East. But something funny happened in this world in the late 1980's: the Cold War ended. The Soviet Union, the fierce and oppressive symbol that dominated our foreign policy and our fears for decades, collapsed upon itself, like a stone mansion betrayed by rotted timbers. The threat of overnight incineration, while not completely gone, had receded far off into the distance. My nieces and nephews, now my age when I was hearing those bombers overhead, would not have to learn about radiation and evacuation routes and nuclear detonations. Then, it was 1991. I was half-listening to a television report, where it was noted that next year, 1992, would be the thirtieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thirty years... The missile crisis was the closest we had ever come to a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, and as I listened to that television report, a thought came to me. What if? What if war had broken out during October 1962? How would have the war been fought? How would the world look, ten years later, in 1972? Would there have been a Vietnam War? A moon race? The civil rights movements of the 1960s? So many questions, so many places to explore. Which is one of the two reasons why I wrote RESURRECTION DAY, to search out how terrifyingly close we came to disaster in 1962, and to see how changed our world would have been. That was the primary reason for the book. And the other reason... well, it was a chance to reassure a scared boy, somewhere back there, huddled in his bed as the bombers scream overhead, that everything would be fine, that the world would not end in the next fifteen minutes, that he would not face a future as bleak as the one in RESURRECTION DAY, and that all of us would survive, would grow up to be survivors of the longest and deadliest confrontation this century, the Cold War. Congratulations, reader. You made it.
Rating:
Summary: Great alternate historical fiction
Review: Ten years have passed since the Cuban Missile Crisis turned into an atomic war between the United States and the Soviet Union. For the past decade, martial law with media censorship rules America. The British provide aid to the struggling country. The Soviet Union is a vast wasteland as they did not come close to matching fire power with the USA. Boston Globe reporter Carl Landry investigates the murder of a veteran Merl Sawson. Carl's interest started a month before someone shot Merl in the head. Hinting at a conspiracy in '62, the vet approached the journalist asking for help. When Major Devane deletes Carl's innocuous article from publication, the reporter begins to question the system. He soon meets London Times reporter Sandra Price at an English Consul reception. Her inquisitiveness encourages Carl to investigate Merl and his theories even if it places both of them in harms way from two governments who want the truth left out there. RESURRECTION DAY is a superb what if tale centered on the decade following an exchange of atomic bombs during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The alternate history story line works extremely well as real persona from the seventies make appearances that seem genuine. The suspense never eases up as the audience becomes fascinated with the roles of Rockefeller, McGovern, and Reagen, etc. while fully rooting for Carl to expose a not so disguised General Curtis. Award winning author Brendan DuBois, author of the Lewis Cole mysteries, has written his best work to date, a tale that will be on everyone's top ten lists for 1999. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: A Different Time Line That Parallels Our Own
Review: When I first started reading Resurrection Day I was afraid that it was just another thriller, just that it was set in an alternate reality, like Fatherland, but the truth be told, its so much more. In this alternate reality the Cuban Misssle Crisis escalated past demands and threats and into a full out nuclear war, leaving the Soviet Union utterly decimated and the USA better off, but only slightly so. Our hero is a former Green Beret turned reporter, and our heroine is a reporter for the London Times turned MI6 spy. So 1962 was the year for the nuclear war, Vietnam never escalates into a war, protestors never have a chance to start in with that, but the draft is still in effect and thousands of soldiers are drafted and sent to zones infected with radiation. So protestors still take on the draft. The people of the United States still learn to distrust their gov't. during this tumoltuous time period just as it happened in our own reality. Our country still looses its innocence during the same time period as it happened in our own. Though I read a lot of alternate history, this one got me to thinking about alternate realities in a much more philosophical way. Sure there may very well be other realities out there where the Nazis won WWII, or the South won the Civil War, or where oranges evolved into the dominate species, or they may be just as boring as your desk sits 2 inches over to the right from where it currently is. But with all that out of the way, this book was very believable, I could see everything invisioned in the pages of this novel, and could have lived there myself, it seemed that well thought out and imagined.
-SPOILER WARNING- Do Not Read Past This Point
One thing that I liked and disliked at the same time was the charactor of General "The Rammer" Curtis, notice the similarities between this man and the charactor of General "Hooker" from Dr. Strangelove. Both are cigar chomping men who are looking to start a nuclear war.
What bothered me about this? Well mainly its that I'd have thought DuBois could have developed something on his own, rather than such an obvious copy of a classic movie character. And I liked it, because I recognized the homage paid to Stanley Kubrick.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting speculation about America down for the count.
Review: This is an "alternate history" novel. The premise of Resurrection Day is that the Cuban Missile Crisis got out of hand, and escalated into a full nuclear exchange following a US invasion of Cuba. The aftermath is that the Soviet Union has been completely destroyed, and the United States is crippled, economically depressed, and under what amounts to a military dictatorship. The US is the junior partner of Great Britain, which is untouched by the war, and which has supplanted the US as the preeminent world power. The British mission to the US wields great power within the country. Here, by the way, the author uses the same concept of a US as a political satellite of Britain that Streiber used in "Warday" (which is another, earlier novel about the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange).
The story moves along reasonably well, although I would not say that the ending is particularly startling. The novel's strong suit is the detail and realism of the author's portrayal of America under military control. One gets the impression from reading the novel that such a thing could happen, and that it would of course be a disaster for the country.
Like "Warday" the novel's weak suit is its premise that an America that is down for the count would not get back on its feet in the manner shown by the Germans and Japanese following the second world war. The novel gives no real explanation for why it assumes that America would remain poor and impoverished from devastation that, while bad, is less complete than what either Germany or Japan experienced from WW2.
Overall a decent read. It accomplishes its goal of making the reader appreciate the fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not escalate.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting but a little on the long side...
Review: During my vacation, I picked up a novel by Brendan DuBois called Resurrection Day. An interesting bit of alternative history that could have been better than it was...
The book is set in 1972, 10 years after a thermonuclear exchange that wiped out Russia and left America dependent on the aid of others. This all happened because of the Cuban missile crisis. The US invaded Cuba, Cuba used tactical nukes, and the US treated that as an attack by Russia. Most of the government was killed in the attack, and plenty of areas are still off-limits (like New York City). Carl Landry is a reporter for the Boston Globe, and he's been contacted by someone who has documentation that shows what *really* happened during that time. But before Landry can get the papers, the source is mysteriously killed. Landry then becomes the focus of a number of groups who want to know what the source had, and they all think that Landry either has the inside track or possesses the papers. When he discovers a thriving underground culture of people living in New York (who the government says don't exist), he has to figure out who to trust in order to prevent an impending invasion of the US by foreign powers.
The book has an interesting premise, and on that point it's not a bad read. It's also a long paperback (580+ pages), and I think that's where it breaks down. I think this book could have been done very well in about 350 pages. As it is, there seems to be a lot of ground that's covered repeatedly without advancing the story as quickly as it could be.
If you're into alternative history, you'll probably like the book. If you're looking for some escapism or an entertaining novel, you might find this one a little slow for your tastes.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing mix of suspense and alternative history
Review: The Cuban Missile Crisis ranks as the most terrifying moment of the Cold War, the point when the United States and the Soviet Union came closest to waging a nuclear war. In this novel, Brendan DuBois offers a terrifying speculation how it might have turned out, with a postwar America still recovering from a "limited" attack that killed millions and turned the country over to a quasi-military regime. DuBois' concept is well thought out, from the gangs of "orphies" (children who were safely in bomb shelters while their parents were caught above ground when the bombs fell) to the legend created around the possible survival of John F. Kennedy, a figure reviled for plunging the world into war.
Yet for a work of alternative history to succeed, it isn't enough simply to have an intriguing premise. The story within the book needs to be strong, and it is here where DuBois's book stands out from most alternative history novels. His plot, which follows a reporter whose investigation of a seemingly mundane murder leads him to the conspiracies which form the foundation of the post-war America, is exciting, with realistic characters that readers can relate to struggling to survive in this nightmarish America. All of this is told in a fast-paced, gripping narrative that make for great reading.
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