"If something isn't aesthetically pleasing or interesting, doesn't require skills I do not have, and makes a stupid point stupidly, I don't appreciate it as art. That doesn't make me a philistine. It makes me a non-rube."

--Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The One with The Bourne Sanction

126. Title & Author: The Bourne Sanction by Eric Van Lustbader (687 pages)*
Genre: Fiction--Thriller
Completed: 11 December 2009

Summary & Review:
Jason Bourne is recruited by his friend and mentor Professor Spector to help stop an eminent terrorist attack by a group called the Black Legion. During WWII, Heinrich Himmler created a special band of Islamic soldiers to fight against Stalin's Red Army. This band was called the Black Legion. Unfortunately, this group did not vanish at the end of the war, but rather they turned their sights away from Stalin and onto New York.

First of all, why was this book so long? It should have been 300 pages shorter. The sheer length for a story like this made the pages crawl by and caused reading it to feel like a chore. Additionally, Van Lustbader used this book as a platform for a strange grab-bag of causes. Everything from waterboarding to the holocaust to discrimination against Muslims was addressed here. For the most part, he really had to stretch and make strange jumps in the story to be able to cover all those disparate topics.

Rating: 4.5

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