Customer Reviews

The Hunter, The Hammer, and Heaven: Journeys to Three Worlds Gone Mad

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I know the author personally. He has spoken twice to my international conference of intelligence professionals from over 40 countries, and by common acclaim has been invited to join us each year, forever.

This is not a "tough guy" or thrill seeker. Robert Young Pelton is an unassuming gentle person who created a niche for himself with his annually updated "World's Most Dangerous Places" and the related Discovery TV program "Come Back Alive," and in the process discovered that most Embassies and most journalists don't look for the truth, much less find it.

In this book, he has done something useful that could not be achieved with his more focused and fragmented country by country almanac of world dangers. He has chosen three representative renditions of hell on earth--one dealing with the greed and corruption of diamond mining in Sierra Leone; another dealing with religious intolerance and government terrorism in Chechnya; and the third dealing with massive environmental as well as economic issues in Papua New Guinea.

Each of the three stories combines a rather matter of fact but most interesting story of exactly how he gets in and out of places and who he sees and what they say; with his insights on where the various parties are clashing and how they are doing. Each of these "case studies" is distinct, but taken together, they give one the sense of dispair that comes from reading Robert Kaplan, or William Shawcross, or Ralph Peters.

Robert Young Pelton is as close as I have found to a true global "intelligence minuteman" capable of getting at ground truth using only legal and ethical methods. He is unique for having traversed the earth and seen it all, as well as for putting such knowledge in the hands of the taxpayers who fund our government's continuing exclusion of such places from the public debate over the future of our peace and prosperity.

If we are ever to get a grip on foreign policy and national security spending, it will be authors such as Robert Young Pelton that make it possible for "the people" to take back the power over how we spend taxpayer funds.

This is a book which takes one's breath away, it was so hard to put down. It is a chilling and accurate picture of life and death in three extremely troubled world areas. Having spent much time myself in rich and not rich countries I am amazed at the consistency of his experience with mine. The book rings true with the voices of smarmy hucksters, bent politicians, the well-intentioned, the men and children with more guns than sense, and the bullying of powerful governments, or pseudo-governments, against ordinary people. What is most amazing is that Pelton was able to survive these death-defying experiences and live to tell these fascinating and true stories from the unbiased viewpoint of an observer rather than the participant that he was. It will always be one of my favorite books. It has everything - history, politics, contemporary events, a touch of romance, and great adventure, all well-written. Indeed, the book is a lesson for cynics who say that there is no more adventure left in the world. Adventure is not dead - it is alive and lying in the places ignored by the mainstream conservative press which only seems to play the sycophant to today's cardboard politicians and their wealthy supporters, all masquerading as world leaders. Pelton shows us what real men - and women - are made of, and how to dispassionately and professionally relate their history in the making.

The Hunter, The Hammer and Heaven is a compelling book that transports you to places few of us would dare to go. Pelton is an old hand at surviving in the midst of danger and treachery.

The fast-paced stories of far away places are remarkably vivid and will leave you wanting more. When you're not right there with Pelton on the razor's edge in situations with people who have lived anything but ordinary lives, he's briefing you on the historical background and causes behind the chaos, tragedy and insanity of these places.

I highly recommend this book if you are ready to visit to the dark side of human nature.

The book was not only a hell of a ride, but also had deep comments on the political situations that most of the developed countries often neglect due to lack of information. Pelton exposes some of the saddest situations in the world with an easy read that is captivating, exciting, and also eye opening.
For those of us who have always wanted to learn about what is going on in the world without the normal prejudices, this is the book. I don't have the money or the balls to do what he did, but I have always wanted to.

Give Robert Young Pelton credit for having the courage to go where few journalists are willing to go and report on stories that most of the world is completely indifferent about. In this case, he traipsed to Sierra Leonne, Chechnya and the island of Bougainville in Papau New Guinea to cover three vastly different war zones where people were dying and little attention was being paid. With all three stories, Pelton sets the recent historical backdrop and then travels into the thick of things.

The Sierra Leonne piece, which kicks off the book, is by far the weakest. The guerilla conflict there was essentially over by the time Pelton arrived and he neither witnessed any of the atrocities committed there first hand nor has much luck providing real insight other that the obvious: namely that the diamonds buried beneath the soil provided the income to keep the rebel forces going.

Pelton has better luck in Chechnya, where he entered Grozny shortly before the 1999 Russian offensive and barely escaped the advancing forces. This is war reporting at its best, immediate and chilling. This part is particularly relevant in providing understanding to the recent Russian hostage crisis.

The back story of the Bougainville section was the most enlightening part of the book. I'm sure very few people outside of the south Pacific region are even aware that the large, mineral rich island has been the site of a terrible insurrection for more than a decade. Once again, however, Pelton doesn't arrive until after the shooting stops and his attempts to interview the elusive Bougainville rebel leader Francis Ona are only interesting to a point.

Overall, an interesting if uneven work that will appeal most strongly to those who like real life adventure tales and those with a curiosity about the world's most dangerous places.

I stumbled across Robert Young Pelton's comebackalive.com website while researching the topic of mercenaries in Africa, and paused to take a look at one of his books. The time was well spent, numerous typos and grammatical errors notwithstanding. Let's hope his next manuscript gets better proofreading.

Pelton's "The Hunter, the Hammer, and Heaven" chronicles the author's fearless journeys into three separate hearts of darkness: Sierra Leone, Chechnya, and Bougainville. Each is a place where surely angels would fear to tread, but Pelton, with careful persistence, deftly tiptoes through each, and not only comes back alive, but brings the raw, gritty truths of modern war with him. Places that are usually just a few lines buried in the back page of the Sunday paper spring to hair-raising life as Pelton gets to know the people in each place, and their motivations for fighting.

There is a lot of excellent material here for anybody who is trying to sort out all the players in these hellholes without benefit of a scorecard, and reading this book will impart a much deeper understanding of how and why such conflicts occur.

Another impression the reader will get is that the media outlets of the world are hopelessly out of touch, far more concerned with the color of Hillary Clinton's underwear than with the chaos, death and destruction that they are too lazy or corrupt to see. In my case, Pelton's reporting served only to underscore what I already knew - the media giants are completely out of touch, but in ways I never realized until I read this gutsy man's words.

The book also serves as a window into the shadowy private military operations (like Sandline International and Executive Outcomes) that have superseded the mercenary armies of the 60's and 70's. The book makes (in my opinion) a convincing argument for supporting such actions, rather than condemning them as has been done over and over in the mainstream media. Upon reading this book, you'll come away with a much better understanding of each hot-spot, and a profound respect for Pelton's awe-inspiring courage in seeking out and telling the truth. Highly recommended.

What an incredible ride! Mr. Pelton took me along on his journey to meet the people who live in worlds so far removed from our own. He helped me to understand the different sides of every conflict. In particular, the Kamajors of Sierra Leone have developed some interesting startegies as they carve out their survival. Thanks for the insight into these unique cultures.

I really wanted to like this book. The subject matter is extremely interesting, and Pelton did a fantastic job of getting interviews, tours, inside information, etc that make this book very important for understanding the referenced conflicts. His stories of personal contacts, and their everyday - and sometimes extraordinary - existence were elightening.

Unfortunately, the book was poorly edited. Repeated sentences, mis-used words, "they" turned into "the" so often that it became expected...all of these mistakes took away significantly from the story and interrupted the flow of reading, sometimes as often as every two pages. Sometimes a story can escape its flaws and sometimes it cannot. Too bad that this is one time that the story could not stand on its own.

I don't think much of the World's Most Dangerous Places, but I was surprised to find that this book was so astoundingly poorly written. Mr Pelton is clearly a better adventurer than he is a writer, and in fact these stories would have been far better if they had been ghost-written.

The topics are intriguing; stories of the chaos and nonsense that come of policymaking by the corrupt, small-minded, evil, or uninformed are nearly always good reading, and Pelton's tales of mercenaries being hired by sovereign governments and indigenous revolutionary movements in the sunny South Pacific are no exception. He is clearly capable of winning the trust of some unsavory and fascinating characters. But the output is marred by what seems to be an almost willful lack of editing, on either the macro or micro scale. The stories do not hang together, events occuring out of chronological sequence with little narrative justification. And the sentence structure, grammatical mistakes, and typos made me literally angry; I believe that when I pay full price for an expensive hardback book part of what the publisher owes me is decent copy editing.

In the end, neither Pelton nor Lyons Press should be rewarded for producing this kind of slipshod material. "The Hunter, The Hammer, and Heaven" was clearly output to capitalize on Mr Pelton's fame as the creator of the World's Most Dangerous Places, but the gratuitous low quality of the book is an insult to readers. With another week or two of editing and review this could have been a solid if unremarkable product; as it is, "The Hunter..." is merely an exercise in frustration.

I have enjoyed reading The World's Most Dangerous Places and Licensed to Kill which led me to purchase The Hunter, The Hammer, And Heaven: Journeys to Three Worlds Gone Mad. Awesome insight to the Madness in Africa and so on. Very interesting and very intelligible author.