Book Reviews from 2026

For historical content, this book is strong, and it effectively forms a man-on-the-ground narrative from the battles of the Chosin Reservoir campaign of the Korean War. But considered purely on writing quality, it's only decent. For instance, the author has a strange and persistent love of comma-splicing clauses that are nowhere near full sentences. I can accept it as a stylistic quirk, but it makes for uneven reading.

First Hemingway I’ve read in a good long while. The stereotype is that he writes lots of short sentences, but I don’t think that’s true. He likes writes a lot of direct descriptive sentences, but also goes hog wild joining them together into the long run on that are expressive in the way poetry is: dense with imagery, occasionally wandering into philosophical speculation.

I was holding out hope that the ending would not be sad, but it was, and abruptly, viciously so.

I felt a little disappointed that the main plot was ultimately all in Paul Berlin's imagination. Yet there were clues throughout the book, such as in Paul's thoughts to himself while in the observation post, that the soldiers had successfully returned from their search for Cacciato. So I knew ahead of time that in some way they had to have "returned" to Vietnam. I guess I was just holding out hope that all the fantastic events of the book would have really happened.

Enjoyable, but I felt the plot wasn't fully-formed, and I didn't like that things just petered out into epistolary epilogue fragments at the end.

This book was valuable even though I'd already read Under the Black Flag and The Republic of Pirates. Dolin focuses on piracy's effects on the eastern seaboard of colonial-era America, which the other books only covered in passing as necessary.

For instance, from The Republic of Pirates I knew the basic outline of Henry Avery's attack on Muslim treasure fleets off the coast of India, but I never knew that the Mughal Empire's outcry over that attack, transmitted to the British East India Company and from there to the Crown, directly led to an Act of Parliament which materially contributed to the decline of piracy in its Golden Age. I also didn't know that there was a thriving pirate base in Madagascar involved in both the slave trade and the transport of pirates to and from the New World.