Just Finished Reading 'Unintended Consequences'...

[Phydeaux642]

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for carrying on a very interesting and civil discussion within this thread. Sometimes discussions here break down all too quickly with name calling and such and that is disappointing. I have read every word here and may go back and read them again. Again, thanks.

 

[BCCL]

I finished UC today, overall I think it was a good book.

It is a little chaotic reading at times, but an interesting story. I found a few things odd, like how nearly every black character is portrayed as a ghetto ebonics sounding stereotype.

One thing that lost me, I must have missed something, but on pages 849-850, one of the characters kills a woman with Wilson Blairs Beretta 92F, but I don't understand who she was????

 

[Geronimo45]

one of the characters kills a woman with Wilson Blairs Beretta 92F, but I don't understand who she was????

Janet Reno, if my sources are correct.

 

[HK G3]

First I suppose I should say that I never read this book, I just read what were essentially the "Cliff Notes" version on another message board for firearms enthusiasts. I had heard a lot about this book from other gunnie types, but it just wasn't something that would interest me in reading. So I suppose that my take on the book probably has less meaning than those that actually read all 800+ pages, but I'm nonetheless going to give my take on it.

I have to say that the only thing that I could feel about this book after having read the condensed version (which contained excerpts from the actual book) was that it was vile. Part of this is the fact that discussing the brutal murder of multiple US politicians with an incredible amount of detail that makes it seem as if the author is a sadist and getting off on the fantasy being portrayed in the book is just upsetting. I don't like these guys in Washington who are actively trying to take my rights away as much as everyone else who enjoys their 2A rights, but murdering them? It's absurd and offensive.

As a non-fiction work, it tried to blur the line between fantasy and reality far too much. The author clearly knew this, as he ensured to never actually have a real politician murdered in the book, but created characters meant to be those politicians, and then offed them in brutal ways. For example, at some point he writes about someone murdering a woman who was meant to be Janet Reno by sticking a Beretta 92FS in her mouth, and then goes into such ridiculous detail of her death as to have the slide smash one of her teeth after the action is cycled and the bullet is done turning her brain into mush or whatever it was that Mr. Ross had written. But he makes sure not to actually name her, and instead gives a description, and then has the main character throw an envelope with identifying language written on it onto the corpse.

Henry Bowman himself is a criminal even prior to murdering ATF agents in cold blood. He consistently violated NFA laws, merely because they inconvenienced him, and he didn't want to pay the tax, or be registered since his tinfoil hat was on far too tight. IIRC, the book discussses how he chose to register only a few of his machine guns after the 1968 GCA, and then hide the rest. Laws that should have only inconvenienced him are perceived as pure oppression, until finally he views the government as tyrannical because they wanted to arrest one of his friends. He hardly seems sympathetic, and it really shouldn't be much of a question as to why he came under ATF scrutiny to begin with. Especially since he pulled a gun on two agents and then stole their badges at one point prior to the murderfest.

There were also some odd attacks on EPA, and FAA, among other agencies. While the main character feels that drunk driving is acceptable, because he can pull it off, he is morally opposed to flying while drunk, but is enraged by the physical fitness standards imposed upon pilots, so much so that certain FAA officials enter into his crosshairs. Then they have this contrived plot about a deadly chemical spill that the EPA mandates must be cleaned up, seeing as the spill could enter into the groundwell water system which people drink from, and could kill them. This ends up financially ruining someone, and so they decide to punish the EPA agents too. Never mind the fact that they estimated up to 100 people would have died from the tainted drinking water.

The sexual situations just became insane really quickly. Even when there was no need for sex to enter the equation, the author would find a way to fit it in (ex, having a stripper in cahoots with the Bowman murder brigade seduce multiple men, collect their bodily fluids, and then ultimately dump it into the rectum and stomach of one of their victims who happened to be, surprise surprise, an anti-gun politician). The roving band of gay rape gangs made very little sense. The blend of sex and violence seemed far more at home in a Clive Barker horror novel than in a book of this nature. At least in CB novels, the blend is meant to serve a point about the nature of pleasure, or to horrify the reader, since it is meant to be in the horror genre. From what I could tell, there was also an obsession with rare and extremely high caliber weapons, which eventually became sexual - at one point in the book, the main character even goes so far as to contemplate whether or not it would be mechanically possible for him to make love to a 4 bore barrel. Talk about ridiculous.

The book just becomes a self-indulgent quasi-masturbatory fantasy about, "Wouldn't it be cool if everyone could start murdering the feds and repealing all the laws, and women would throw themselves at us because of it? After all, we clearly live in a fascist dictatorship without free elections or anything like that, and violence is just a natural aphrodisiac, so...."

The series of ridiculous events that take place in this book seem to be more of a disturbing insight into the deeply troubled mind of Mr. Ross than anything else.

 

[BCCL]

Janet Reno, if my sources are correct.

OK, the "I take full responsibility" suicide note makes sense then.

 

[Tommygunn]

Henry Bowman himself is a criminal even prior to murdering ATF agents in cold blood. He consistently violated NFA laws, merely because they inconvenienced him, and he didn't want to pay the tax, or be registered since his tinfoil hat was on far too tight. IIRC, the book discussses how he chose to register only a few of his machine guns after the 1968 GCA, and then hide the rest. Laws that should have only inconvenienced him are perceived as pure oppression, until finally he views the government as tyrannical because they wanted to arrest one of his friends.

"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who tries to resist it,"~~John Hay, 1872.​

People who don't own guns are unlikely to be personnally concerned about an assault weapon ban, or the NFA laws, and people who don't work in the media, or publishing, may be equally unconcerned about restrictions on the first amendment. People can be very unconcerned about politics until their own ox is gored. There's a famous quote by a Reverend Martin Neimeuller about this ... I'd quote it but I'll probably just "Godwin" myself.

I'm not trying to infer you're apathetic about gun rights, but since Bowman had several NFA weapons he "hid" he may have been someone John Hay was specifically refering to .... rather than a trade unionist the Reverend Neimeuller chose to ignore because he wasn't one.
He viewed the government as "tyrannical" when they tried to arrest one of his friends because they tried to do it at zero dark thirty with a "no-knock" warrent in a particularly ugly way, and, IIRC, he didn't realize they were Feds until the SHTF. That can be fairly persuasive ... IMHO.
Yes, he did get vicious, and some things in the book can easily be perceived as over the top. An earlier poster said the book was "fantastical" and I think that's a good way to look at it.

 

[DoubleTapDrew]

I guess everyone has their own breaking point on where a government crosses the line and becomes tyrannical. It's easy to pick off small groups at a time since the others won't stand up for them.
Has the 2nd amendment gained any ground in the last 100 years (not including losing rights then gaining them back, like carrying a firearm without going to jail)? Seems like it's been lost a little bit at a time, for a long time. The anti-gun movement has sure made a lot of progress. What are there now, something like 20,000 gun laws in this country?

Henry didn't register several of his NFA guns for fear of confiscation. There are a LOT of people in this country that prefer doing FTF sales for the same reason. At this point in time that probably is paranoia, and I hope it always stays that way.

 

[HK G3]

I'd love to see the NFA and Hughes Amendments repealed just as much as anyone else.

But I want to see them repealed via a freedom-loving congress, that we, the people elected. The passage of the CCW laws during the time of the AWB shows that it is still possible. But if everyone is busy burying illegally converted and owned machineguns with the intention to use them against the government in the future, then the threat of "government tyranny" would seem to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I do agree, however, that no-knocks on innocents have become a very disturbing trend ever since the "War on Drugs" came to a head, and I wish that someone would try to rectify the problem. It's just something that needs to gain popular momentum to fix.

 

[Tommygunn]

But I want to see them repealed via a freedom-loving congress, that we, the people elected. The passage of the CCW laws during the time of the AWB shows that it is still possible. But if everyone is busy burying illegally converted and owned machineguns with the intention to use them against the government in the future, then the threat of "government tyranny" would seem to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Oh don't get me wrong HK, I would like to see NFA laws repealed PEACEFULLY too.
In some ways though we might be arguing "which comes first, the chicken or the egg." Bowman was cacheing NFA weapons because --in his opinion -- the government had become a soft tyrant by passing the NFA and other laws in the first place. While some may arguing that cacheing these weapons illegally might provoke a tyranny, people more sympathetic to Bowman's position might argue he was responding to tyranny.
I guess it's a matter of perspective, really.

Is it possible to repeal them (NFA laws) peacefully? Many point out the growth of CCW in the past years as a reason to be optimistic. IMHO they're wrong to use this as a reason to believe it will happen soon. It won't happen in Obama's first administration for sure. Given how people have come to expect the government to be a "nanny" I frankly am stumped to see how it will be a possibility in the next decade or so. My crystal ball gets foggy after that. Aside from this, the NFA owning community is just not large enough to be a strong political force. If it's to be done, they will need a lot of help ... and that ain't there.

 

[Kentucky]

Quote From BullfrogKen

If we reduce ourselves to admiring valor in defeat, and fighting only to gain a few more weeks, or a "more glorious death" . . . that's what we'll get.

While people point to the Warsaw uprising as a great, last stand, remember - it was their last stand. They died. Their families died. Those who were left were horribly oppressed, stripped of their entire possessions, and exiled to slave labor camps. The Germans won. Only through the great efforts of the rest of the world were the Germans defeated. And it still didn't bring back those "glorious dead" Jews. It didn't erase the fact that entire generations of families were shoved into ovens, and those who managed to survive had to rebuild their lives from nothing, with nothing, and sometimes completely alone.

Quote from Alexandr Solzhenitzyn who won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1970 for his book "The Gulag Archepalego,"

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? . . ."

The Jews at Warsaw were at the point that they had nothing left to lose. The point was that once they realized that, they were able to mount a defense that cost the Germans weeks of time, and lots of manpower, including many who lost their lives, to stamp out. This despite the fact that they had no training, no weapons to begin with, and were small in numbers.

I believe the authors point to including this story, as well as several others, was written in the introduction of the book.

"Stripping motivated people of their dignity and rubbing
their noses in it is a very bad idea."

I certainly would rather win a battle than die in losing it, but if faced with the choice of dying for what I believe in vs a concentration camp, I'll take my stand. I am sure Sam Bowie, Davy Crockett, and the other men at the Alamo would have preferred to win too, but they believed in their cause and they fought against overwhelming odds, tying up Santa Anna's army of men while Sam Houston raised an army to go fight them.

the simple fact that Ross' heroes are inaccessible beatified figures really reduces the reader's ability to sympathize or connect with them.

Wow, with your high standards I bet you dont enjoy many movies either do you? Ocean's Eleven? Nah. George Clooney and Brad Pitt are impossibly smart and good-looking. Any Chuck Norris move is out of the question because Chuck is just impossibly tough. As a matter of fact, there are very few movies or novels where the characters arent smarter, better looking, or tougher than anyone you have ever met.

Adding in how other agencies (FAA and EPA) were arbitrarily and capriciously destroying peoples' lives broadened the issue to "freedom" instead of just "gun rights."

Exactly. Freedom is under wholesale assault from a lot of different directions. Being involved with Farm Bureau has given me some first hand exposure to cases where the EPA has LITERALLY stolen peoples property and wrecked their lives.

For example, at some point he writes about someone murdering a woman who was meant to be Janet Reno

Read Andrew Neapolitano's book, Freedom in Chains. Janet Reno has personally ruined enough lives to serve her own purposes that she deserves a firing squad. To say nothing of her involvement in Ruby Ridge and Waco.

Henry Bowman himself is a criminal even prior to murdering ATF agents in cold blood. He consistently violated NFA laws, merely because they inconvenienced him, and he didn't want to pay the tax, or be registered since his tinfoil hat was on far too tight.

If you are a gun owner and dont realize that registration has proceeded confiscation countless times in the last 150 years, then I dontk now what I can do for you. Tinfoil hat? A more accurate observation would be to say that anyone who doesnt think there is/was a high probability of confiscation has their head planted in the sand. And that is putting it mildly. Confiscation has even happened here in the USA! Katrina obviously, but Chicago and California have been able to confiscate firearms because their owners had registered them.

Submitted by Charles Gossett on 1/20/02. ( [email protected] ) 64.12.97.7

Confiscation of Registered Guns Begins in Illinois


Chicago Anti Gun Enforcement (CAGE) unit. This elite squad, operated jointly by the Illinois State Police, the Chicago Police Department, and the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, supposedly exists to identify illegal gunrunners. However, information gained by the ISRA makes it clear that the CAGE unit is targeting law-abiding citizens, not criminal gunrunners.
The Chicago Police Department and the Illinois State Police have teamed up to make good on Mayor Daley's pledge that, if it were up to him, nobody would have a gun. Daley and his elite "CAGE" unit are apparently taking advantage of gun privacy loopholes to pinpoint certain individuals for inclusion in the confiscation program.

The ISRA is following up on leads in one case that has disturbing implications. An elderly first-generation Chicago resident was recently paid a visit by an Illinois State Police trooper. After asking to come inside the man's home, the trooper asked if the man owned a gun - to which he replied yes. The trooper then directed the individual to surrender the firearm. The man complied with the officer's demand and the trooper left with the gun. And the story gets better...

The gun in question was purchased legally by the man in the 1970s shortly after he became a U.S. citizen. When Chicago's infamous gun registration scheme went into effect in the early 1980s, the man registered the firearm as per the requirement. However, over the years, the fellow apparently forgot to re-register the firearm, and forgot to renew his Illinois FOID Card.

So...what does this all mean?

In the last edition of The Illinois Shooter, we reported on the activities of a shady taskforce known as the Chicago Anti Gun Enforcement (CAGE) unit. This elite squad, operated jointly by the Illinois State Police, the Chicago Police Department, and the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, supposedly exists to identify illegal gunrunners. However, information gained by the ISRA makes it clear that the CAGE unit is targeting law-abiding citizens, not criminal gunrunners.

Thanks to a ruling by a liberal federal judge, the CAGE unit now has the name of every single person in the United States who, since 1992, lawfully purchased more than one handgun in the period of a week. The CAGE unit also has all the makes, models and serial numbers of those guns. In essence, the Chicago Police Department is now registering guns and gun owners nationwide.

The ISRA has also learned that the CAGE unit has compiled a list of families where more than one person in that family holds a FOID card. Acting on that information, the CAGE unit is now contacting gun shops where those families have shopped, and is illegally registering all guns purchased by those families.

Now, it appears that the CAGE unit is scrubbing Chicago's gun registration list against the list of FOID card holders. Indications are that folks who have let their registrations and FOIDs lapse will have their guns confiscated. We have to wonder how long it will be until state troopers show up at the doors to confiscate the guns of non-Chicago residents who have let their FOIDs expire.

More later as this story develops.

Source: Illinois State Rifle Association

Laws that should have only inconvenienced him are perceived as pure oppression, until finally he views the government as tyrannical because they wanted to arrest one of his friends.

If you view infringements upon the Second Amendment as "only an inconvenience", I can understand why you dont like UC. Perhaps you would better enjoy "Bowling for Columbine".

 

[BullfrogKen]

From the FAQ portion of our Study Group's website:

What kind of men shoot the NTI, who are they and what common traits do they share?
--------------------------------------------------------
As a group, they are a diverse lot. They include police officers and other law enforcement officials, musicians, military personnel, bankers, lawyers, writers, doctors, and people from just about every other walk of life you can imagine. What they share in common is the belief in individualism, honor, and the greatness of our country.

The men who shoot the NTI are superior to the common man in many ways. This superiority comes not from physical prowess or intellect. It radiates from the fiber of the man his spirit. This spirit is communicated by the saying “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn said it even better. He said, “It is better to fight on your feet than on your knees, but you can still fight on your knees.”

The inferior man loses his will and his tenacity when the matter before him advances beyond words. The superior man looks at the conduct of such men with revulsion. A bad man walks into a McDonalds restaurant and orders another man to lay down on the dirty floor next to his children and then executes them all, is viewed as disgusting bully and a murderer. However, the man who allowed this atrocity to occur, without a struggle to protect his family, is putrid and sickening.

Adherents to the ATSA philosophy, and those who benefit from the NTI experience, are prepared to face deadly situations with deadly force, when necessary.

I am aware of Solzhenitsyn's work, and have read The Gulag Archepalego. He does lament that people did not resist. But do keep in mind that had he resisted, he would not have survived to tell his story, or the stories of what happened to his countrymen. There would be no Nobel prize.

I'm not suggesting we offer no resistence. There is a time for it. And there are such things as fighting honorably, contasted to brutality. Strategies that involve murder and terrorism will not sway public sympathies. And as Jeff pointed out:

Shows what a small group of determined people can accomplish when they don't have popular support.

The resistence is quelled, the public accepts it, and life marches forward without them. A lot like what happened at Waco.

I certainly would rather win a battle than die in losing it, but if faced with the choice of dying for what I believe in vs a concentration camp, I'll take my stand. I am sure Sam Bowie, Davy Crockett, and the other men at the Alamo would have preferred to win too, but they believed in their cause and they fought against overwhelming odds, tying up Santa Anna's army of men while Sam Houston raised an army to go fight them.

Yup, the defenders of the Alamo were evertually vindicated when a larger army was formed to return and finish the war.

So, who will comprise the large army to come behind those who give up their lives in armed rebellion to gun laws and wage an effective "war" against the government? I saw no army rise up to go vindicate the glorious dead at Waco. Without popular support, any armed rebellion will find itself snuffed out and the instigators regarded as a public danger who deserved their fate.

John Locke laid down a pretty good foundation for when, how, and under what conditions revolutions succeed. Our nation's founders followed that model. And their cause was regarded as worthy in the eyes of the colonials because of their patience, honorable methods, and their ability to sway public opinion.


Kentucky, I enjoy a good movie as much as the next guy. The difference is I don't put those works of art up on a pedestal and pronounce them "the best ever", especially when those works really aren't. I've heard enough folks pronounce UC the best work ever, and frankly it's a poorly done work. It could have been much better with a good editor. But even were it a technically better read, the messages is sends are still pretty vile. And to have the gun community venerate it is rather embarassing.

If you view infringements upon the Second Amendment as "only an inconvenience", I can understand why you dont like UC. Perhaps you would better enjoy "Bowling for Columbine".

It doesn't have to be either-or, you know. For those who read and study the mental struggles and anguish our nation's founders went through, modern day fringe gun rights advocates would label them antiwar, English apologists. My point is the same as theirs - We avoid armed conflict until all other options are attempted and exhausted.

 

[yokel]

We are shooting for an ideal here.

It is convenient to hide behind a facade of toleration, appeasement and 'no war' and a very easy thing to run the risk of adopting “peaceful reconciliation of opposing forces” and “mutually beneficial” to the bitter end, to the last extremity, however calamitous.

Those who propagate conciliation with the enemy should take heed from the lessons of history.

Face it -- if given a chance to stand up for our rights, even at the cost of our life, most of us will choose to play it safe and say that we are opposed to the use of force or maintain to the end that "things today just aren't that bad."

 

[BCCL]

Read Andrew Neapolitano's book, Freedom in Chains.

Are you sure of that author, I thought Freedom in Chains was written by James Bovard.

 

[BullfrogKen]

I have Bovard's Freedom in Chains here. If Justice Neapolitano wrote one by the same title I'm not aware of it.

 

[Kentucky]

You are both correct. I own both and I went back and looked, it was The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land. that I was thinking of. I have Freedom in Chains as well and I sometimes get them mixed up in my head.

From the FAQ portion of our Study Group's website:

Thanks for linking that. Interesting site, had never heard of that group before.

I'm not suggesting we offer no resistence. There is a time for it. And there are such things as fighting honorably, contasted to brutality. Strategies that involve murder and terrorism will not sway public sympathies. And as Jeff pointed out:

If things ever come to a shooting war, what kind of fighting do you see as having a chance for success? An "honorable" war with conventional means seems to me to have absolute zero chance for success against a modern military. What the UC scenario does is carry the fight to those who are the true enemies. If it comes to a shooting war, the real problem wouldnt be those military or LEO individuals who are attempting to enforce the law. It would be those who are making the laws and sending them out to do the fighting.

We all know about the gun confiscations that happened during Katrina. What if an armed resistance had broken out there? Would you fault someone for refusing to give up their means of defense at a time like that? For refusing to allow the government to confiscate their guns?

Carrying that scenario a bit further, if the confiscation attempts had started a shooting battle, who would have deserved to get shot more? The police and NG's who may not have wanted to do it but felt compelled to by orders, or the mayor who issued the orders?

Now as you said, an armed insurrection has little to no chance of succeeding if it does not enjoy some measure of popular support. In the book in the case of Henry Bowman, he did not have an option of waiting for popular support. The war was brought to him and his choice was to fight, flee, or surrender. As long as he was at war, his best chance of winning/survival was not to keep playing cat and mouse with armed military/LEO's, his best chance was "cutting of the snakes head". Making the fighting of the war too costly and unbearable for those who make the decisions. This is the obvious template for any type of civilian resistance in the last 74 years.

The fact is, the assault upon the Constitution, civil liberties, and certain American citizens begins with the lawmakers who choose to ignore their oath of office and shred the freedoms that our forefathers died for. In a war, they do not and should not enjoy any type of immunity from the results of their actions. Although the country was not at war in UC, Henry Bowman and his friends were.

The resistence is quelled, the public accepts it, and life marches forward without them. A lot like what happened at Waco.

The fact that the United States government was allowed to attack, lay siege for 51 days, and then burn alive 76 people, including 21 children and two pregnant women, without a tremendous uprising from the "Patriot" community is a cause for eternal shame for all of those who consider themselves patriots. That is TERRORISM.

So, who will comprise the large army to come behind those who give up their lives in armed rebellion to gun laws and wage an effective "war" against the government? I saw no army rise up to go vindicate the glorious dead at Waco. Without popular support, any armed rebellion will find itself snuffed out and the instigators regarded as a public danger who deserved their fate.

We are chasing a lot of rabbit trails here. In the context of discussing UC as the thread started, Henry Bowman and friends did not have the luxury of waiting for "popular support". Their choice about when the war started was made for them.

And their cause was regarded as worthy in the eyes of the colonials because of their patience, honorable methods, and their ability to sway public opinion.

Remember, only about 1/3 about the colonials actively supported the Revolution. Less than that at the beginning of the war. When the men at Lexington & Concord fired their first shots on April 19, 1775 they did not know if they would ever have the luxury of popular support. As a matter of fact, it was over a year later that the Declaration of Independence was signed. All those men knew for sure at the time was that the government was coming to confiscate their firearms.

Furthermore, I dont know how "honorable" some of the tactics were that were used to sway public opinion. John Hancock and Samuel Adams were pretty well known for greatly exaggerating the truth even telling extravagant lies to drum up support for their cause. The Revolution came about as it did in large part because of their efforts.

Finally, remember that the press at that time was very adversarial to the government, whereas now it is pretty much a propaganda arm instead. In the case of Waco, how many times did you hear the press mentioned that falsified statements were used to obtain warrants? That the Texas National Guard was lied to about what the "charges" were against the group? That the original "weapons charges" went out the window when the group volunteered to allow all their firearms to be inspected? That false drugs charges were alleged, as well as false charges of child abuse? I was only 8 years old at the time but I sure dont remember the press hammering on any of that. They WERE used to paint the Davidians in a very bad light and quell any public sympathy.

Kentucky, I enjoy a good movie as much as the next guy. The difference is I don't put those works of art up on a pedestal and pronounce them "the best ever", especially when those works really aren't. I've heard enough folks pronounce UC the best work ever, and frankly it's a poorly done work. It could have been much better with a good editor.

I agree that UC had a lot of info that was superfluous, and obviously it was not written by Shakespeare. I dont think anyone is arguing that John Ross is the finest technical writer of the day. The reason that many people, including myself, place it on such a high pedestal is that it does a superb job of outling a century's worth of abuses by the government. As someone has mentioned before, all of the information is available in other places, but I dont know of anywhere else where it is grouped together so concisely. I have read the book about 3 times, which is a considerable time investment given that it is such a large book. I guarantee you though that I have spent 10 times more time investigating and studying some of stories and historical events that are described in the book for myself, to see whether they were true or not.

I just turned 24 years old and even though I have always loved history, there were a lot of events described in UC that I had no idea had ever happened.

But even were it a technically better read, the messages is sends are still pretty vile.

If you are talking about much of the language, and the personal sexual conduct of Henry Bowman than I agree. It was a big obstacle for me and some of the people I have lent the book to. If you are talking about something else, I would like to hear you elaborate on it.

 

[Pitch]

I just turned 24 years old and even though I have always loved history, there were a lot of events described in UC that I had no idea had ever happened.

Care to be more specific? With the exception of minor tidbits like Adolph Topperwein, Unintended Consequences covered less of the 20th century than my high school history class.

 

[BCCL]

I would be surprised to see a history book printed in the last 30 years that mentioned the "Bonus Army" incident.

I graduated in 1985 and mine sure didn't. I knew about it before reading UC, but surely not from school.

 

[The Freeholder]

Yeah, I enjoyed it without reservation. Perhaps I'm just easily amused.

I think a lot of people's problems with the book are exactly what you point out--Henry's lifestyle. What many folks fail to realize is that he leads a fairly libertarian life, and that is part of the story. The guy just wants to be left alone in his private life. He inflicts himself on no one, and doesn't want to suffer the unwanted "attentions" of others.

Now, if you want to object to the book because if offends your morals or sensibilities, feel free. I don't.

 

[MikePGS]

I would be surprised to see a history book printed in the last 30 years that mentioned the "Bonus Army" incident.

Mine did. Class of '98.

 

[BCCL]

Mine did. Class of '98.

You had better ones than me, not to surprising, mine only dedicated 2-3 pages to the Vietnam War!