PATRIOTS

Ulysses Press

Written by James Wesley, Rawles

Copyright © 1990-2009 by James Wesley, Rawles. Fourth Edition (Expanded) All Rights Reserved.











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In Patriots - written by James Wesley, Rawles - America in the near future has an economical collapse and the infrastructure of the country fall. Now a group of survivalists must gather together at an enclave to protect themselves from the gangs of looters.

Most of this book is more of a textbook on survival instead of having an actual story for the book since Rawles has a blog on family preparedness. Actually, most of the dialog between characters were more like an instructional manual of how they did things during their journeys and of gathering their gear instead of any real character development. The story did not really get interesting until the last third of the book as the characters deal with a provisional American government and a provisional President of the United States of America as they go to war. While I can understand that a provisional American government was put in place, I never got any real knowledge of how the original Federal government was disbanded aside from an economic collapse. There were also a couple of characters that I thought would become major characters in the book, but these characters just disappear without any resolution to them.

There is a disclaimer in an IMPORTANT NOTE TO THE READER that the novel is only for entertainment purposes only and not intended as a source of instruction. Although, there were a number of survival skills described that would seem to be quite helpful.

There is a Glossary at the end of the book of survivalist terms, as well as an Index of various survival subjects that you can refer to.

Pancho 
All people smile in the same language.
 

Flight of the Phoenix

HarperEntertainment
An Imprint of  HarperCollinsPublishers

Written by Elleston Trevor

Copyright © 1964 by Elleston Trevor. All rights reserved.

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In Elleston Tevor's The Flight of the Phoenix, a Skytruck air freighter runs into a sandstorm - and crashes in the Sahara desert,  the largest desert in the world. Now the survivors of the air freighter must struggle to stay alive in one of the hottest places on Earth as they desperately try to build a smaller new airplane from the wreckage of the Skytruck.

The development of the surviving characters are uneven - as I only recall half the characters of whom I could distinguish from the others. The struggle for leadership between the guilt-ridden pilot Towns and the obsessed engineer Stringer, as they construct the new plane to get away from their harsh landscape, is the main focus of the characters - although I was a bit put off by Stringer's inexperience with the real world. When the British soldier Captain Harris insists on traveling through the vast desert to a distant oasis to get some water, it seems almost cruel to me that the captain expects his sergeant to go marching with him into the parched, forbidding dessert. Especially since the Sahara desert gets less than three inches of rain per year. This book has been made into two movies - the 1965 film with James Stewart with a Fairchild C-82 Packet, as well as the 2004 film with Dennis Quaid with a Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar. I saw the 2004 film in the theater and the plot point towards the end of the movie was a shocker for me, but it seems to have been played down in the book.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.
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