Customer Reviews

Resurrection Day

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

One thing that ticks me off about after-the-bomb books is weak research on the effects of nuclear weapons, or on operational plans and capacities. This book suffers from that fault, despite good writing and a nice plot.

Apparently the "Cuban War" of 1962 results in the US getting hit by something on the order of 10-12 Soviet nukes. This is reasonable, if slightly pessimistic. (My own guess would be something on the order of 6 or 7.) The Soviets simply didn't have many delivery systems which could reach North America.

Two things aren't reasonable:

First, after losing 3 or 4 cities and a few military bases, the US is shown as still devastated ten years later, with widespread areas dangerously radioactive and the economy only just recovering from a near-total collapse.

Not!

My father stood in a slit trench 1.8 miles from ground zero during a bomb test in the late 1950's, and he's fine at age 83. Yeah, if you're under the immediate fallout plume from a multimegatonne ground-burst, it's game over. But two weeks later, the same territory is pretty safe; a year later, virtually completely so. Most active isotopes have very short half-lives. There are exceptions (strontium-90, some metal isotopes), but there were scores of above-ground tests, and the increase in the cancer rate nationwide was undetectable without fairly sophisticated statistical analysis.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reoccupied immediately after the explosions. Generally speaking, ten years after a bomb goes off you can go to ground zero, strip naked, rub the dirt all over your body and eat it with a spoon, and all you'll get is a dirty skin and indigestion.

Hence the US, with a largely undamaged infrastructure, would recover quickly. Germany and Japan did, from far worse damage -- they don't call 1945 "The Year Zero" in Germany for nothing, and the damage in Japan was worse. The firestorms in Tokyo and Dresden killed about as many people as nuclear attacks, and did as much physical damage.

Second, the USSR did have a very dangerous launch capacity in 1962... only it was aimed at Central and Western Europe, and the book shows those areas getting off scot-free.

Not going to happen. Not even remotely possible. The missiles and bombers were set to go and would have launched immediately against European targets when SAC went into action against the USSR. Western Europe was chock-full of USAAF bases, just to start with; and the Soviets planned for a city-busting strategy, as well.

They certainly weren't going to let the _Germans_ come through intact, for Christ's sake!

As the joke went in the 1950's and early 1960's, the Soviet Union's deterrance capacity could be summed up as: "If you Americans attack Holy Mother Russia, we will nuke the hell out of Germany, France and Britain! Just see if we don't!"

Britain, for instance, would have lost at least a dozen major cities -- and given the dense population and restricted area, would have been an absolute charnel house.

The actual result of a nuclear war in 1962 would be:

Moderate damage to the US. Moderate if you didn't happen to be in NYC or Washington, that is.

Total devastation of the USSR.

Very severe damage in Europe.

Let's start with the basics: Buy it. Read it. It is a very good story. Here is the why:
In general, what separates the great stories from the avarage ones? Some might say that its the ability of some part of the story to remain with you long after you have finished reading it. In this respect, "Ressurection Day" deserves to be classified as a classic of Alternate History and a great story to boot.
From the beginning, Dubois chooses his fork in time carefully. An all too near to reality scenario where the Cuban Crisis ends in World War III is just the kind of twist to lend this alternate world a heafty dose of credibility. Focusing on JFK has Dubois sending his readers directly into what I would term the "Oliver Stone realm of nostalgia" - the world as it might have been had this or other event not hapenned.
From these basic ingredients, Dubois weaves an intricate tapestry of memories and tragedies, hopes and fears. This is a world full of regret and a palpable sense of sadness, looking back in anger at the shattered American dream. And in it comes Ressurection's main character, Carl Landry, ostensibly trying to solve a murder, but actually hoping to achieve much much more.
Landry's journey through a devastated America is a tour de force of sketches into the avarage person's life after such a cataclysmic event. There are no big heroes to fill the canvas, just a collection of disparate people, nut unlike you and me, trying to make the best out of a horrible situation. The people and the places, the hopes and fears are what you would expect to find in your own neighborhodd, a fact which makes the horros of the war resonate with an uncanny attenuation. I guarantee you that long after you have forgotten any of the characters or the plot, the images of an America that might have been will remain in your mind as a powerful deterrent to a future you will not want happening.

Resurrection Day was full of promise to be one of the most interesting tales told this year. The premise is fascinating. What if the Cuban Missile Crisis had escalated into all-out war and the United States had been hit with nuclear weapons?

With this premise, Brendan DuBois presents us with a cast of characters that could inhabit the devastated landscape one might find ten years after such a tragedy. Unfortunately, the characters are predictable, more types than individuals, and the plot unfolds according to the formula. The picture DuBois paints is somewhat interesting, but his execution falls far short of the promise.

Carl Landry is the protagonist of this tale. Now a reporter for a censored version of the Boston Globe, he is an ex-veteran, a man who joined the Army in the flush of enthusiasm that accompanied the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. He served in an obscure country called Vietnam and lived to see starvation in California. In Carl's world, American survivors envy rich Canadians and rich Mexicans. He is joined on his search for truth by Sandy Price, British reporter for the Times, the obligatory love interest and temptress who is not completely what she seems on the surface.

Disappointingly, this book offers nothing more than a simple morality play of the good people versus the large and malignant forces of the government. Our hero faces impossible odds, and it is not all that difficult to imagine how things are going to play out in the end.

For readers who do not mind the predictable nature of the story, Resurrection Day does paint an interesting picture of a devastated landscape, of a country that is bowed but not broken. Read for what it is, a mass market paperback, it is not all that bad. Readers who expect something new or different, something at all challenging, are likely to be disappointed.

This is a good book for a long airplane trip or for someone who wants a break from challenging books. It's mildly entertaining, but not at all a keeper.

I've been mesmerized by ,"Seven Days In May ", "The Wind Chill Factor", and "Red Storm Rising "...this novel was BETTER. When you pick this book up be sure you've given yourself enough time to finish it in one reading , because it is impossible to put down . The author takes the simplest of premises --What would have happened if the missiles had been launched in October of 1962 ?--and gives a complex ,thought provoking , and spellbinding answer. As one of the baby boomers who can still remember air raid drills as a schoolboy in Queens, New York City I found the passages about the Battle of New York , the "lost"children in the schoolbuilding basements , and P.S.19 both plausible and probable . Living in an age when its become cynically fashionable by the historical revisionists to sneer at the idealism of the Kennedy Era I found this story of Grand Tragedy and Heroism to be compulsive reading. The style with which the alternative history of this tale is deftly told puts this book at the head of its class. Great adventure, mystery, history, and storytelling all roled into one----H.G. Wells and Jules Verne would tip their hats to the author. BRAVO !BRAVO !---If you are looking for that perfect book to curl up with and forget about everything else in your world for a night or weekend -this is it !!

Although it starts off a bit meandering, Resurrection Day quickly builds into a book difficult to put down. There are two phenomenal stories here. One is what if the Cuban Missile Crisis had turned into WWIII? The other is what the US might be like as a 3rd world nation. Both are compelling.

DuBois writes engaging characters and fills his plot with enough turns to make a Ballerina tipsy. I repeatedly tried to geuss the ending, and even the next page, and was always stymied. The conversations flow convincingly, and the story is a joy to read.

Here we are given a look at how Americans are like the rest of the world. If you strip them of the technological advantage, and the moral advantage of a well-constructed constitution that is actually followed, they respond like everyone else. Not badly, not well- just as humans, struggling to survive.

Don't get me wrong, DuBois' writing is terrific and the book is well-written ~~ but it seemed to have dragged me along in a couple of chapters as I anxiously await to read what the reporter Carl Landry is on the hunt for. And some of the characters are predictable ~~ much to my chagrin. But if you're looking for a really good "what if" book, this is it.

I was born way after the Bay of Pigs incident and the Kennedys I know of are the ones I read about ~~ John John and Caroline. Oh yes, Senator Ted Kennedy. So, when I picked up this book, I thought, oh cool, a history lesson mixed in with fiction. Well, DuBois didn't really go into the history part as much as he writes about what if the Russians did bomb us and we bombed the Russians, and how would our lives be? That part is terrifying ~~ I cannot imagine living in a police state nor can I imagine losing everything and everyone in a nuclear blast. And DuBois plays well with your emotions and fears as he writes about Carl Landry on a mad hunt for the truth.

Landry is joined by a British reporter, Sandy who has secrets of her own. And together, they tried to find out what had really happened that fateful day World War III had broken out. And the military is hot on their tail ~~ they didn't want Landry to find out the the truth. It makes for a good reading.

Just because I didn't think it was suspenseful enough for me (No one can be like Patterson or some of those other writers), it is still a good book to pick up. In fact, I am planning to pass this onto my friends and family and see what they think of it. I am sure my parents would enjoy it better as they had lived through the Kennedy times ~~ and still remember those drills in case of a nuclear attack.

If you're looking for a fiction that has plenty of action and dialogue, then this is it. If you expect it to be more historical, this isn't it. Still a good read though.

I looked forward to this novel with great eagerness, as I am a fan of intelligent alt-history/sci.fi. writing. However, when I was through reading, I put the book down with a slight feeling that something was missing.I would have liked more information on the hero, Carl Landry...less of a soap opera plot between Landry and Sandy....less caricature of the military... It seems as though Dubois had several different ideas for the story -anti-military harangue? Potential movie of the week?-and while the book had many interesting and touching points, most were brought up, glanced at, then dropped. That is, I would haved liked to know more about the orphans in the NYC subways, not just have them appear as a convienient plot point. However, this book was entertaining, well-written and basically enjoyable. I just feel that Dubois could have done more...or better. I think it would have been more effective if he either dropped some characters and subplots, and fleshed them out more fully and made a much larger book.

This is an "alternate history" novel. The premise of Resurrection Day is that the Cuban Missile Crisis got out of hand, and escalated into a full nuclear exchange following a US invasion of Cuba. The aftermath is that the Soviet Union has been completely destroyed, and the United States is crippled, economically depressed, and under what amounts to a military dictatorship. The US is the junior partner of Great Britain, which is untouched by the war, and which has supplanted the US as the preeminent world power. The British mission to the US wields great power within the country. Here, by the way, the author uses the same concept of a US as a political satellite of Britain that Streiber used in "Warday" (which is another, earlier novel about the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange).

The story moves along reasonably well, although I would not say that the ending is particularly startling. The novel's strong suit is the detail and realism of the author's portrayal of America under military control. One gets the impression from reading the novel that such a thing could happen, and that it would of course be a disaster for the country.

Like "Warday" the novel's weak suit is its premise that an America that is down for the count would not get back on its feet in the manner shown by the Germans and Japanese following the second world war. The novel gives no real explanation for why it assumes that America would remain poor and impoverished from devastation that, while bad, is less complete than what either Germany or Japan experienced from WW2.

Overall a decent read. It accomplishes its goal of making the reader appreciate the fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not escalate.

"Resurrection Day" kept me interested throughout, but I must admit that it's depiction of America in 1972 post WW III didn't ring quite true to me. If you're an alternate history fan, or interested in the Cuban Missle Crisis, then this is a worthy read, but that's not to say that it was ~completely~ satisfying (but then few books are).

Although "devastated America" kept being alluded to, it never quite came to life for me. Carl's daily life seems fairly ordinary, and affected only in small ways. This might indeed have been the case if the war happened in '62, since the world wasn't as wired and thus as fragile at that time, but even so, I expected more ~"Alternativeness"~ in his world than I found.

For those that might feel similarly, I recommend the book "Warday", which was published back in about 83-84. "Postman" by David Brin, a great book and not-so-great movie also explores the same genre in a surprisingly effective (and affecting) way.

The Cuban Missile Crisis ranks as the most terrifying moment of the Cold War, the point when the United States and the Soviet Union came closest to waging a nuclear war. In this novel, Brendan DuBois offers a terrifying speculation how it might have turned out, with a postwar America still recovering from a "limited" attack that killed millions and turned the country over to a quasi-military regime. DuBois' concept is well thought out, from the gangs of "orphies" (children who were safely in bomb shelters while their parents were caught above ground when the bombs fell) to the legend created around the possible survival of John F. Kennedy, a figure reviled for plunging the world into war.

Yet for a work of alternative history to succeed, it isn't enough simply to have an intriguing premise. The story within the book needs to be strong, and it is here where DuBois's book stands out from most alternative history novels. His plot, which follows a reporter whose investigation of a seemingly mundane murder leads him to the conspiracies which form the foundation of the post-war America, is exciting, with realistic characters that readers can relate to struggling to survive in this nightmarish America. All of this is told in a fast-paced, gripping narrative that make for great reading.