Adventure, Reviews, TEOTWAWKI

Holding Their Own II by Joe Nobody

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I’m a TEOTWAWKI/post-apocalyptic fiction fan going way back, to when I first saw The Road Warrior.  For many years, it seems like there hasn’t been a lot in the genre that’s well-written, unless you want zombies.

I’m working on such a novel myself right now, and wanted to keep my mindset grounded in the genre. So I’ve been listening to a lot of late ’60s rock (it works for me), and have tried a few TEOTWAWKI series on Netflix (all of which became overbearingly stupid after a few episodes).

I had some extra Audible.com credits this month, so I went shopping for a recorded book. And, being stung too many times by both tradpub and indie authors, I perused the reviews before taking a chance. I’ve been at this long enough that I usually know which reviews to ignore and which to pay attention to, and author “Joe Nobody” seemed to have a lot going for him. Also, his blurbs were competently written. (You might be surprised how many authors expect you to take a chance on their books after posting poorly written descriptions.) This is why I started the Holding Their Own series with the second novel–opinions were just about unanimous that the narrator for #1 was too awful to endure for hours.

So in this one, subtitled The Independents, the SHTF already, and folks are surviving as best they can.

The hero’s name is Bishop. Not sure whether that’s a first or last name, but it doesn’t really matter. He and his wife have a small ranch hidden in a canyon in Texas, surviving and minding their own business. The story kicks off when a former military/intelligence colleague of Bishop’s crash lands in a small plane after buzzing the hidden ranch.

“The Colonel” is seriously injured in the crash, and a whole bunch of other stuff is triggered as well. The plot involves a Colombian drug lord , a kidnapped girl, a treasure in gold, and a frustrated doctor without the right tools and materials to help his patients…just to name a few.

The adventure factor made this the most fun I’ve had in the genre since reading The Last Ranger and Doomsday Warrior series as a young man, though there are no radioactive mutants or B-movie villains in this one.

Where the author shines is in his characters. Bishop is smart and skilled. Not invincible, but he doesn’t cause me to groan like so many heroes in the genre, either. He faces some pretty intimidating odds at different points, and enjoys good luck for sure, but his triumph is entirely plausible as written. What’s more, I actually liked the character of his wife in this book. Most female protagonists in the genre are written in a way that causes me to roll my eyes and skip ahead. But this one is the kind of woman you’d want to have in such a situation.

Well, frankly she’d be a prime catch for any man in the western world these days, but especially in a frontierish survival scenario.

Mr. Nobody has made me a return customer with this book.

Music, Socio-Sexual Studies

Alpha Anthems: “The Wanderer” by Dion

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With his group the Belmonts, Dion had a classic doo-wop hit with “I Wonder Why.” After that his emphasis shifted from music to becoming a teen idol, and he put out some candy store fodder for the next couple years.

Maybe he grew self-conscious after all the pandering to teenage girls; and this song was an attempt to prove to the guys he wasn’t a total wimp.

Methinks perhaps he doth protest too much.

Nevertheless, there does seem to be some red pill themes at work here. He brags about his success picking up hotties in every town, but when he finds himself “falling for some girl,” he jumps in his car and lays rubber out of there.

If Rosie (the one he loves best) can fit under his shirt during normal day-to-day activity, she might be almost skinny enough for the average manosphere blogger.

Non-Fiction/Documentary

The Book Biz, Blogging, and Amazon Reviews

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Seems like there are thousands of bloggers in the manosphere, and most of them either have books published, or will have soon. So a lot of you probably understand the significance of the much-coveted Amazon review.

My first book was published in 2010 and I did pretty much everything wrong. (I became a blogger not long afterwards kind of by accident.) If there was a mistake to be made as an author, I made it. An opportunity to be missed? I missed it—for the first three years of my writing career. Long story short: One truth I found out the hard way was that an indie author’s career lives or dies by Amazon.

The more essential I realized Amazon was, the more of a presence I tried to maintain there.  That, and my old blog, were the reasons I became a prolific Amazon reviewer for a while.

I still get more review requests than I can ever hope to fulfill, so this post can also serve as a disclaimer. My methods may be peculiar or even bizarre; sometimes perhaps inconsistent as well. But nobody’s paying me for this, so I make the rules. At least I have a modicum of ethics, unlike many reviewers out there.

First off, my reviews are honest. I may cut authors slack (see below) with Amazon’s star rating, but I don’t make stuff up or try to BS anybody.  If the book flat-out sucks, I usually don’t even review it. If a review was requested and the book sucks, I contact the author to tell them. If they still insist on a review, I write one and let people know it sucks. I make an effort to be constructive, but you can’t polish a turd.

My schedule is very tight and I have an impossibly-gigantic To Be Read pile. Because of that, I use audiobooks whenever possible. I have an Audible.com subscription and I get my money’s worth from it. If you have an Audible version of your book, that increases its chances of getting read/reviewed 10X, all other factors being equal. It’s a real sacrifice to stop what I’m doing, halt my productivity and read a book. But I can listen to a book while getting other stuff done.

Back in the day I used to read for the pure joy of it, and the escape it offered. Without audiobooks, that phase of my life is long gone. I’ve served my time when it comes to Quixotic thankless jobs helping other authors succeed, so I am less and less inclined to spend precious time needed for my own career to read/review scads of other authors’ books. If you get your foot in my door at all, most likely you’ll have a long wait on your hands (again, unless you’ve got an audio version).

Next, I usually give preference to indie authors. As an indie, I know what an uphill struggle it is and I empathize. So I push indies toward the front of the queue and also cut them more slack on Amazon (I have no star-rating scheme on the blog so just say what I think and leave it at that).

There are exceptions: As a result of my reviewing, I’ve made friends with tradpubbed authors whose books I love. Because they are friends, I sometimes shuffle them to the front, too.

Also, I’ve stopped mucking about with books outside my genre umbrella. Unless I owe you a favor, I’m probably not going to read your book if it’s not men’s adventure (be it science fiction, fantasy, war, western, TEOTWAWKI or whatever flavor of men’s fiction). I occasionally review non-fiction and classics, but solely at my discretion. I have author friends, and sometimes stretch beyond my preference to help them out, but don’t count on it. If you see me review a romance or horror novel, it’s safe to assume that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve gotten picky in other ways, too. In the past, I read/reviewed indie books written from the typical leftist/feminist/America-hating perspective. (Some of the better ones I even gave four or five-star reviews on Amazon. )That’s history. You pinkos already have the deck stacked in your favor, and don’t need additional help from me. Apolitical work is great, but my patience for leftard, globalist…and even neocon…stuff has been worn completely through. I get enough of that crap everywhere else and I’m definitely not gonna expose myself to more when I have a choice. Same goes for “gay” pandering and the obligatory pixie ninjas and other “strong female characters.”

The buck stops here.

And if you sucker-punch me with any of that…one strike and you’re probably out. A while back I was working my way through a series written by some fellow pulp writers. I got sucker-punched a third of the way through one book with some establishment-approved homophile bupkus and stopped reading right there. Never finished the book; never will; and may never try another one from that series. I definitely won’t read that author again. This kind of thing has become a deal-breaker.

As you can surely tell from this post, I tend to be long-winded. Most of my reviews were lengthy—more like scholastic book reports than typical Amazon feedback. (Actually, you’re lucky to get more than a sentence or two from the average Amazon reviewer.) I have begun making an effort at brevity. Don’t feel cheated or spurned if I only give you a paragraph—that’s probably my new standard, for everybody.

It used to be Goodreads was an afterthought for me. I’m in the process of making it my default venue. It’s probably the closest to social networking I will get, anymore. In fact, unless requested by the author, it’s possible I won’t even bother to duplicate Goodreads reviews on Amazon. If you’re on Goodreads, hit me up. I could use some book recommendations from non-SJW/feminista/homophiles.

Finally, there’s an issue that really chaps my fourth point: Amazon’s helpful/non-helpful votes for reviews.

There are a whole bunch of worthless reviews on Amazon. These include:

  • Reviews by people who have obviously never read the book.
  • Reviews by people who have only skimmed the book, or not finished it.
  • One or two-sentence drive-bys that give an “it sucks” opinion without any clue as to why the book allegedly sucks.
  • Hatchet jobs by leftards out to sabotage non-leftard authors based on their beliefs, not on whether the book was good or bad.
  • Combinations of two or more of the above.
  • The positive equivalent of any of the above examples of negative reviews.

“Reviews” like those are deserving of a “not helpful” vote. However, what I’ve noticed is that people vote “helpful” or “not helpful” based on whether the reviewer personally liked or didn’t like the book.

I sacrifice valuable time to write thoughtful reviews. Whether I liked the book or disliked it, I take pains to be constructive in my critiques. I use examples and give reasons for what I say, which makes it possible for the reader to intuit whether they would agree or disagree with my opinions. (Some negative reviews I’ve read have convinced me to buy a book.) I’ve never written the equivalent of “It rocks! Buy it!” or “It sucks! Next!” without explanation. And yet it’s pretty much guaranteed I will get “not helpful” votes any time I give an overall negative report.

Not only that, but I’ve gotten “not helpful” votes on positive reviews because I didn’t rate the book in question five stars!

What a bunch of bovine assclowns.

One more thing along these lines: So far I’ve avoided responding to negative reviews of my own books. But if you’re foolish enough to mouth off a stupid comment about one of my reviews, you will likely have your ignorance thrown back in your face.

UPDATE: Forget  what I said about Goodreads. It is an SJW-converged playground; I have taken my toys and left the sandbox.

UPDATE 2.0: I have now, on occasion, begun responding to negative reviews of my books. Not always, because some readers are honest and honestly just didn’t like something. Others, however…well, we’re in a culture war, and I’ve decided to shoot back.

 

Music, Socio-Sexual Studies

Mangina Melodies: “I’m Your Puppet” by James & Bobby Purify

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Wait…is the last name Purify or Pussify? The latter is definitely what happened to the generation raised listening to this song.

Now granted, a whole lot of females out there think they want a puppet…but they’re never happy when they get one (whether they find a turnkey version or fundamentally transform some chump into one). And there are plenty of manginas out there just dying to be a puppet for some manipulative shrew. But they’re not exactly being mobbed by romantically-minded women, are they?

I’m sharing the video with the lyrics teleprompted (so even Obama can sing along). WARNING: Virtual Pulp is not responsible for irresistible impulses suffered from hearing this song…like the urge to hunt down the pathetic worm who wrote it and strangle him to death for the good of the species.

Fantasy, Politics/Current Events

Marvel Comics’ Insanity

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Maybe you’ve heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results.

But enough about American voters. I’m talking about the comic book industry.

I was a comic aficionado before it was cool. Had quite a collection and spent money on comics regularly. But as the writing became increasingly stupid and the left-wing, feminist, homophile prejudices became more blatant, my interest dwindled until I quit buying them.

Evidently, I’m not the only one. The industry has really hit the skids in the last few decades. Were it not for movie adaptations, comics would be a strictly counterculture pastime for basement-dwelling neckbeards.

Much like the Democrat Party (and their RINO enablers), comic book companies’ “solution” to an economic debacle is to amplify the very same policies that caused the devastation.

So DC decides the original (Golden Age/Earth 2/whatever) Green Lantern should be a homosexual. Marvel decides Thor should be a woman. And surely there’s even more of this crap going on with other characters, but I lack the stomach to get up-to-date on the cesspool comics industry.

Either the creatively bankrupt propagandists at Marvel read our original post about Thor’s sex change, or they’ve heard other people raising the same issues. And just as you’d expect of a self-righteous fanatic, their response was to ignore reason and simply double-down on their own lunacy. You can feel their mangina pride slithering from the dialog in this panel:

comicpanel

Explanation #2 from our original post is worth quoting again:

Nobody at Marvel is educated enough to realize that the pantheons of mythology are brimming with goddesses they could build another super-character out of.

Marxists (cultural and otherwise) have always preferred hijacking the success of hard-working men, rather than coming up with their own ideas, putting in their own sweat, and building their own track record. This pathology, for feminists, is not even limited to reality–it extends even into the comic universe.

Politics/Current Events

Moderates are Good For Nothing But the Other Side

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When Vox Day is on target, the man is SuperSniper. Two of his recent blog posts beautifully express some truth that needs to be swallowed quickly (if it’s not too late already).

When Vox used a Dick Winters quote to illustrate this point, the former paratroopers at Virtual Pulp were pleased with the Band of Brothers reference. (The terms being used here are “killers” and “non-killers,” which correspond to “radicals” and “moderates,” respectively, in the culture war and politics.)

In war, physical or metaphorical, there are very few who are capable of instinctively waging it “without restraint and without regard to their personal safety”. And one important difference between actual war and cultural war is that in the case of the latter, many of the nonkillers spend a fair amount of their time sniping at the killers on their own side rather than at the other side.

Imagine how effective Easy Company would have been if instead of being expected to follow the killers’ example, its nonkillers dedicated themselves to explaining at length that instead of flanking the German gun position on D-Day and killing the German gunners, they should all prove themselves to be better than the Germans by being nice to them. And then, when the killers ignored them and began the flank attack, instead of laying down covering fire, the nonkillers started shooting at the killers. Does anyone seriously think this would be a successful way to wage war?

Why, then, does anyone imagine that the same tactical approach will succeed in cultural war? If the moderates will not at the very least provide covering fire for the extremists, they are useless. And to the extent that they open their cowardly mouths to criticize, correct, and concern-troll the only people on their side who are taking action, they are worse than useless.

Having wasted plenty of time in debates in recent years, this makes me wince with its accuracy. It would be better if moderates simply dropped their pretenses and wore the uniform of the enemy. The leftists, SJWs, feminists and homophiles advance so many logically flawed and provably false arguments, a reasonably informed person could effectively expose them single-handedly, perhaps taking back the respective portion in the marketplace of ideas being contested. This rarely happens, because more often than not, lilly-livered concern trolls (as Vox calls them) butt into the conversation and begin laying a smokescreen for the other side to hide behind.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThey will take issue with the syntax/semantics used if you’re not careful to use Newspeak/politically correct terms. They will accuse you of mudslinging if you don’t sugar-coat your rebuttals. They’ll say you’re heavy-handed if you don’t let the other guy off the hook when they lie or change the subject. Of course they will rarely take note of the other side’s lies, distortions, obfuscations and hypocrisy. By the time they’re done, they will have clouded the matter in question sufficiently to cover the retreat of the opponent. Or even join forces with them and attempt to bury you under a deluge of rhetoric.

Because you are a bigger threat than those with whom they allegedly disagree. You’re gonna scare them away, you big meanie, when you state your case so effectively while not letting the other side get away with lying, double standards, cognitive dissonance, and ignorance of the subjects they claim to be experts on. As Vox puts it in the other post:

So, they suddenly become “strategists” and experts in coming up with ways to prevent anyone from actually doing anything. It’s freaking hilarious to see a few of them “strategizing” together because they inevitably produce a consensus that is not only less effective than literally everything they’ve been criticizing, but is usually unrelated to the original objective. “We should be better than them” is their battle cry. They love to show that they are “better” than the other side by preemptively surrendering and refusing to fight back. Which, of course, is why they reliably lose.

Remember, moderates got us into Vietnam, and ensured we stayed there for quite a while without accomplishing anything of lasting consequence. Anything good for the American or Vietnamese people, anyway. Moderates decided that we shouldn’t finish off Saddam Hussein in Gulf War One because our air power brought smoke on an Iraqi convoy. Egad! We killed people and broke things! That’s not how you’re supposed to fight a war! We must be better than they are. Send everyone home so we can do this again in 12 years.

This attitude pervaded when, after other countries had been fielding professional athletes in the Olympics for some time (the Soviet Bloc nations for their entire history), the USA finally fielded professionals as well. It was just wrong that we would send our best athletes to compete against their best athletes. If Americans don’t have two arms and a leg tied behind our backs, we’re cheating!

You see this in politics all the time. Democrats use every dirty trick possible to ram their agenda down our throats. When it becomes obvious to even the ostriches that Democrats are driving the country over a cliff, Republicans get elected into the majority on promises of curtailing the damage. Those tricks and loopholes the Democrats used, given legitimacy by the news media (because Democrats did it, after all), will not be utilized by the backstabbing frauds of the Establishment G.O.P., who will cave to the other side on every significant bill. Why? Because it’s more important that they prove they’re “better” than the other guys than actually trying to avert the train wreck. At least that’s the reason according to their apologists.

In reality, they share the agenda of those they allegedly oppose. Watch them get a serious challenge from someone in their own party who is NOT a backstabbing fraud, and you’ll see them fight like hell, using every weapon in their arsenal.

John BoehnerThe poster boy of the moderates right now is the pantywaist Judas goat RINO John Boehner, who had all the tools at his disposal needed to stop executive amnesty, but surrendered without a fight, of course. He and his ilk have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory so many times, it shouldn’t take above-average intelligence to see their true colors. They are not opposed to Obamunism. Never have been. Their job is to hoodwink the gullible, and sell us out. That is their true job, and they do their true job quite well.

Whichever side you think moderates really want to help, in effect they are just another asset at the disposal of the opposing force.

 

Action, Military, Reviews

Thoughts on American Sniper

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I finally watched it, and some questions have been answered. One of those questions is, “Why are the critics frothing at the mouth over their hatred of this movie?” I can answer that simply with two facts in the context of the film:

  1. Americans are the good guys.
  2. Jihadists are depicted waging jihad as they do in real life.

Any idiot in the cultural elite knows that Americans are the bad guys and Christianity and free market capitalism are what make the Middle East a hellhole of slavery, institutionalized torture/murder and bloody feudal wars. So that little mystery is cleared up.

I know very little about Chris Kyle. I never heard of him until shortly before his death. I still don’t know the truth regarding some controversy surrounding him, and haven’t researched it. Initially I heard the guy who killed him did it intentionally. Later I heard it was an accident. I also heard that he kicked Jesse Ventura’s 4th-point in a bar fight, after which Ventura pressed charges for assault. Later I heard that Kyle lied about the whole thing, and what Ventura sued him for was slander.

The movie doesn’t take sides on those matters, or even bring them up. Nor does the film take a position on whether the Iraq War/occupation was justified (though Kyle, as portrayed in the movie, does obviously believe it’s a just war).

It was wise of the director to avoid preaching from either side of the pulpit about the War on Terror. I’m sure I would have been offended either way.

The movie is about  a guy who believes in what he’s doing, and I can judge it on that.

I was once a lot like Chris Kyle. I loved my country, and volunteered to fight for her, assuming that wherever I was deployed and whoever I fought would be determined by somebody of a higher paygrade who took their oath of office as seriously as I took mine.

Since then, I’ve adopted the opinion that very few foreign entanglements in American history were justified. And for over a century none of them have been about safeguarding our freedom or benefiting the American people in any way.

But hindsight is 20/20. My motives were pure, even though my idealism was misguided and loyalty misplaced. The only way I would wear the uniform again now would be for purely mercenary motives (which is why most people do it anyway, and who the recruiting marketers try to attract). I would join a different branch and choose a cushy MOS that translates well to a civilian career, do my time, and get out to take advantage of the G.I. Bill.

The military is not the place for patriotic Americans. Hasn’t been for a while. In fact, those few anomalies who do love their country are being actively purged, starting at the top.

Chris Kyle was naive in his time just like I was in mine.  This story is about his life the way he saw it (and how others remember it, I guess). Don’t judge the movie on what it’s not trying to be.

There was another movie about a sniper over a decade ago, called Enemy at the Gates. It took place on the Eastern Front during WWII, where there was no “good” side or just cause. It told a similar story, concentrating on the character discharging his duty. As such, it was a good film. So is this one. Clint Eastwood is a great director and was the right one for this project.

Socio-Sexual Studies

Solidarity Is For Women Only

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The myth of a patriarchy is ridiculous for a few reasons. One is, of the two legitimate genders in existence, it is only the females who feel and act on a solidarity to their own sex. In fact, Team Womyn is the only sex ANYONE shows allegiance to.  Even today, men are compelled to compete against other men exclusively, and habitually act against their own self-interest, and that of men collectively. They are oblivious to the organized opposition to their very manhood,

I don’t like video selfies that much, but this clip is really worth a watch–especially starting around 5:40 or so. If you skip what’s before that, I’ll summarize something she shared:

Several men approached Girl Writes What privately to thank her for speaking out, but when she organized a conference specifically addressing the discrimination men suffer, nobody showed up.

And isn’t that just like us?

When Survivor was all the rage, I never watched it. I had cable with all the bells and whistles at the time but just didn’t watch a lot of TV–especially reality shows. But I caught the first episode of one season while a guest at a friend’s house. From what I could tell, the format of that season was guys vs. gals. The first competition was a timed obstacle course, and the men were winning decisively until some dork lost his balance on an obstacle, fell off repeatedly, and added enough time to the cumulative score that the women were able to pull ahead and win.

If your goal is to win a given competition, then it only makes sense to vote the weak links of your team off the island, right? The loser with no balance should have been first on the chopping block.

Instead, individuals on the men’s side conspired to vote one of their strongest members off the island, and they kept the clown (who I heard caused them to lose subsequent events). The females, however, voted in a way that was best for Team Womyn.

Whatever the rules are in Survivor that might justify the men’s actions, it is nonetheless illustrative of western culture in general.

There is organized effort to assign all the responsibilities in our society to men, and all the benefits/privileges to women. Men can be abused, cheated, conned, even killed, but it’s always women who are recognized as the victim (whether or not a man has the audacity to fight back).

Because vagina.

You’d have to be blind as well as ignorant not to be aware of this.

Yet, while nearly all females have an ingrained loyalty to other women collectively, men continue to throw each other under the bus (often for some psychological expectation of personal gain, perhaps?). At least 75% of the male population are white knights who think the situation should be made worse, not better. And this is just as bad on the right as on the left.

I’m very grateful to Girl Writes What for saying what few have the courage to say (her other videos have good info, too). I know nothing about her personally besides what she shares in the clips I’ve seen (and yes, she would probably look better with long hair…now snap your superficial self back to the subject and focus), but I really feel her pain about going through the trouble of setting up that conference only to have nobody show.

It kinda’ reminds me of one of the windmills I’ve tipped at.

I stopped visiting bookstores after the early ’90s when all the men’s fiction disappeared.

Chick-lit and romance dominate the literary world. Even when you find a book which appears dude-friendly on the cover and blurb, the author will sucker-punch you sooner or later with the obligatory feminist-pandering message and “strong female character.” When the book business went online, the pattern remained the same. And as if the gender bias wasn’t bad enough in mainstream, ostensibly neutral outlets, there are bazillions of groups, blogs, publishers and stores which cater exclusively to women. There was no masculine counterpart.

I got tired of drowning in the estrogen, and decided to make a difference.

My quixotic undertaking involved sparking a revival of pulp fiction and men’s adventure in several genres. Those were the last entertainment mediums that catered to masculine sensibilities, so I considered them the perfect kind of vehicle for taking back a small chunk of the literary world from entitled feministas and their white knight enablers. I imagined that whispered phrase from Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.”

This post is already getting long so, to make a long story shorter: after a couple years investing a whole lot of time and effort to bring back male space into the literary world, almost nobody showed up. And they kept not showing up. I stayed at it, and there were modest inroads made. Other authors and publishers thought a pulp revival was a good idea, so there were glimmers of hope.

What pimp-slapped me back to reality was, one of the guys I networked with brought some soccer mom into a mutual project, who immediately began beating her drum to feminize pulp, have homosexual pulp heroes,  social justice messages and so forth. In other words, to make pulp fiction exactly like everything else.

Shortly after that, it became evident that the guys I networked with to revive pulp didn’t share my Quixotic motives. They echoed the sentiments of the homophile soccer mom.

I had no allies.

It wasn’t the only time I bowed out of a creative undertaking because I  refused to conform. Other than working with cover artists, I’m not sure I’ll ever try to collaborate again.

I didn’t get it when I watched that episode  of Survivor, but now I do: for women, “the battle of the sexes” is a team sport; and they do and say whatever they think will benefit their team. For the male of the species, it’s every man for himself.

Non-Fiction/Documentary, Socio-Sexual Studies

Lessons in Masculinity From an Unlikely Source

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Bill is right, I have to admit: as horrible this series was as a whole, the early episodes (in black & white) were not that bad, as TV science fiction goes.

My sophomore year in high school, this show was on the air when I got home on weekdays. My family never had cable, so choices were limited. I watched it most of the time simply because there was nothing else to do.

There was an upperclassman I changed next to in the locker room that year. He obviously watched the show a lot. His favorite character was Dr. Smith, and he hated Don West.

On the surface this seemed idiosyncratic because the guy was a loud, egotistical blowhard whose behavior bordered on bullying. In other words, what most people would assume to be alpha male traits.

Looking back, though, I realize the “alpha traits” were just part of the guy’s defense mechanism. It was a facade he put on, probably because he’d been victimized by the sort of males he was imitating by the time I met him. Peel the facade away, and he is pretty representative of males of my generation (and later ones). It makes perfect sense why he would choose Zachary Smith as a role model.

Thanks Bill Whittle, for your analysis.

Action, Adventure, Military

Book of the Year Award

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We try not to pimp our Books all the time here, but Tier Zero is in the hunt for the Conservative/Libertarian Fiction Alliance Book of the Year Award.

This is the first such award, and allows entries from 2013 and 2014. So Tier Zero qualified, and was nominated. You do not have to be a member of the CLFA to vote. If you’ve read it, you can vote for it here. If that link doesn’t work (apparently it has trouble on some browsers) you can cut and paste this address in your browser’s URL bar: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/F39TY7Q

Some of the other nominated books have a big fan base, so this is not a cakewalk by any means and your vote is appreciated.

If you have not read Tier Zero, Amazon links are below (paperback and Kindle…plus there’s an Audible version). And here are some excerpts from  Amazon reviews…which you can of course read in their entirety if you choose:

It would be difficult to exaggerate how good this book is as an adventure tale, or how much fun it is to read it. -Jim Morris

I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in this series, HELL AND GONE. As good as it was, TIER ZERO is better in every way. – James Reasoner

…Balls-out, full throttle action. …In this tough, gritty paramilitary thriller (sequel to the popular HELL AND GONE) author Brown harkens back to the “men’s adventure” novels that were so popular in the 80s and early 90s. – Wayne Dundee

As much as I enjoyed Hell & Gone, this book is better. …I can’t recommend it highly enough. – Peter Nealen

Tier Zero (a great play on words) harkens back to the classic bygone era of Men’s Adventure… Today the genre is enjoying a bit of a comeback and Hank is one of the authors driving that. – Jack Murphy

Although I have no doubt legions of Men’s Adventure fans have tried to imitate the writings of their favorite authors over the years, in Henry’s case, the student has definitely become the master. – Jack Badelaire

Now, I know Brown likes to call his work an homage to the bygone mens’ pulp-fiction genre, but it surpasses that. Sure, he hits on the essentials–the attractive women, the brave, rugged fighting men, and the unmistakably evil bad guys–but he’s a master storyteller, too. – Nate Granzow

…A story that is full of action, intrigue and Shock and Awe. Tier Zero is the best of both ages of Dude-Lit. – D.R. Tharpe

So go read it, already. Leave an honest review and vote for it, too.

(If you have not read it and don’t intend to, please don’t vote for it, as that would not be fair to the other authors with a dog in this fight. And speaking of other authors, you can vote for up to three different books. One of those nominated is Fast Cars and Rock & Roll. If you haven’t read anything on the list, we encourage you to pick one and do so–there are  a lot more non-leftist authors out there than there used to be, and you might enjoy their work.)

Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World