On Wings of Eagles by Ken Follett
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Book Reviews of On Wings of Eagles
Book Review: Dry, dull, and anti-climactic: An almost complete waste of time
Summary: 1 Stars
After reading _The Pillars of the Earth_ and its sequel, I was doing a little Web research (Wikipedia) on the Perot rescue and found out that Ken Follett had written a book about it: "What luck!" I thought.
I thought wrong. The format of this book is so dry and dull it was almost unreadable. I forced myself about half-way through just to get the information, and by that time, I couldn't give up on it, even as a loathed every page.
The plain fact of the matter is that this story is just NOT that interesting. It's a big tease. Nothing ever happens. In the end, the same result would have come to pass even if Perot hadn't sent the rescue team. And also, so much for Perot being a big capitalist hero: He was in Iran setting up a socialist welfare state for Iran, much like he helped establish here in the U.S.
The story of Perot's "rescue" of his socialism-enabling employees is worth of an extended magazine article, but not a full-length book. And no matter the length or format, Follett's approach to "non-fiction" novel writing (which he says this isn't) is mind-numbingly boring.
Avoid this volume at all costs.
Book Review: Outstanding
Summary: 5 Stars
I was on the edge of my seat from the first 10 pages. This story was unbelievable and knowing that it was a true story made it even better.Book Review: Very inspirational.
Summary: 5 Stars
I absolutely loved this book. Full of brilliance, persistence, determination, loyalty, adventure, inspiration... it was a really entertaining and uplifting to read and I couldn't believe it was a true story!Book Review: Non-Fiction
Summary: 4 Stars
When some of the employees of the large company that made Perot lots of money get into serious trouble he doesn't get much joy from official channels.
Therefore, he decides to put together his own official rescue insertion and retrieval operation to get his people out.
An interesting tale, indeed, alongside Follet' other fictional works.
3.5 out of 5
Book Review: Not Follett's Voice
Summary: 2 Stars
Follett's descriptions of people in his other books--Code, St. Petersburg, Needle--differ in many ways from the descriptions given in his name here. An example is the (second) introduction of Glenn Jackson, a computer programmer and operator, on pg. 226 of the 1983 paperback edition. The speaker talks about the man as if he's familiar, referring to him by his nickname "Rocket Man", without quotes. Adulation by the narrator for this person isn't necessary for the story. But the narrator isn't introduced as a participant in the story. Given that this familiarity and this adulation is frequent, and annoying, in descriptions of people who worked with Ross Perot, it must be Perot dictated parts of the book to Follett. Perot wanted to praise the people who worked for him, and it's his praise we see in the text.
So, just staying with this typical passage, the person is described as "a combination of a first-class mathematical brain and the ability to stay calm under stress". This is the business vernacular of Ross Perot. Follett would never independently add the articles, which is typical Texan and western U.S. talk. His narrator would never subjectively classify someone as "first-class", which is crude and strictly businessman talk, nor refer to a character by his "brain", which is immature or adolescent jive. Nor does Follett ever get wrong "duress" for "stress", which the narrator does here--staying calm necessarily precludes being stressed, nor can one be "under" stress.
This late passage is selected, not because the narrator gave way later to Perot's influence, but because the narrator has never seemed to let up, despite reader hopes, in his subjection to that influence. The narrative is just brimming in many other ways with irrelevant accounting. It keeps accounting for circumstances that have little bearing on the central story, whereas in Follett's own books, elements revolve around the central plot or he excludes them as purposeless.
One of the least interesting passages is the several pages (100-103) in which the narrator slowly introduces each one of the ten men who form the first rescue group. We are not interested in them until they do something. They are just a bunch of guys sitting around discussing a rescue that is far in the future. For instance, the narrator says that the second man in his list, Boulware, is a full five inches taller than Poche, the first man he has described. It isn't as though Boulware is using his height in the room or will be definitely using it in a rescue--or that we could possibly remember this trivia hundreds of pages later when an actual rescue takes place. And this section is just chock full of trivia like this.
I lost interest in the rescue of these men from a Tehran jail. I wanted to know, instead, how Ken Follett felt when he was liberated to write his own books after this one.