post about the power of the dog

_posts/2016-01-07-the-power-of-the-dog.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: The Power of the Dog
+date: '2016-01-07 17:01:39'
+categories: book
+tags: book crime fiction great
+---
+
+I have seen [*The Power of the Dog*][dog-amazon] on Amazon for quite
+some time now; the cover kept drawing my eye and the description
+was enough to have me put it on my wish list more than once
+forgetting that it was already there. I finally got around
+to reading it, and man was it good.
+
+Not quite historical fiction, there is enough interplay with
+reality that really serves to drive this book forward. One would
+have thought this book to be pure insanity back in the early 80s, I mean
+would the US government ever really help foreign cocaine smugglers move
+drugs and weapons between Colombia, Mexico, and the US? Pure nutjob, conspiracy
+theory crap. Except this is essentially the cynical view of what the CIA
+really did. Maybe it is not just the cynical view, maybe it is just the
+abbreviated view. In any event, this book is solidly written with
+wonderful lines, great characters which are developed thorougly, and has a delightful
+interplay between different story lines, different locations, and different
+points in time.
+
+I really like this style of writing. I am not sure if it even has a particular
+name. Don Winslow weaves some great lines throughout this book, such as
+
+> He half-expects to see blood in the bed -- his dreams are incarnadine;
+> blood flows through them like a river, connecting one nightmare to another.
+
+He also has an extensive vocabulary. The more I read, the more I am fascinated
+by the existence of words that describe a situation or feeling or color
+perfectly, where any other synonym would be lacking in specificity and
+depth. For instance, `menagerie` is a word I did not know existed before
+this book. The dictionary defines it as "a collection of wild animals kept in captivity for exhibition."
+An alternative defintion is "a strange or diverse collection of people or things."
+The former definition fits exactly into a couple scenes in the book,
+and I was thinking if I was writing this how would I have described
+a bunch of wild animals in kept in someones backyard in cages
+for the purpose of showing them off? At the same time, the latter definition
+also fits into describing the scene in a meta sense which gives even
+more power to that single word. This is where I personally feel that
+people involved in comparative literature and literary criticism can
+go off the reservation by calling this usage brillant assuming the author
+had both the surface intention as well as a deeper meta meaning intended
+by the use of this one word. Maybe he did.
+
+But, in another situation, 
+he used the exact same analogy, comparing oil rig pilot lights to
+some kind of street light in hell or something, within twenty or thirty pages
+of one another. It felt like he wrote these two parts indepedently,
+came up with this same analogy twice, and forgot that he had already
+used it. Then he merged those two parts together, and I was left
+feeling like it was an amateur move. The first time I saw the analogy,
+as he actually wrote it, I felt it was awesome. Then when I come across
+it again, I felt like it was really cheap and lessened the prior use.
+
+Nevertheless, overally this book was exactly in my preferred style.
+The writing was descriptive and had a certain literary depth. The
+characters were relatable enough, but developed to the point of understanding
+their motivations even where they were not relatable. The entire plot
+was not too outrageous given the actualy reality of the drug wars
+of the 1970s through 1990s. I highly recommend this, and I plan to
+read his other book relatively soon as well.
+
+
+[dog-amazon]:   http://amzn.com/B000FCK42M
+