Overcoming Addiction, The Spiritual Solution, by Deepak Chopra

Does it make sense to talk about a spiritual solution and then define spiritual as mystical? See note at end of review

Deepak Chopra, M.D. sees the addicted individual as one having potential, and one who is just a misguided seeker.  The true object that we are all seeking he tells us is transcendence and he wants to show us how to reach this condition in his book “Overcoming Addiction, The Spiritual Solution.”

He suggests that addiction is manifest in a variety of mood-altering substances and that they can include alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, drugs, and even just food. Traditional approaches in dealing with addiction are negative, instilling fear as a motivator. Chopra guides the reader to replacing addiction with lasting sources of joy and spiritual fulfillment.

The spiritual is explained as being mystical, an advanced sense of self, beyond our normal self and reaching a point where we abandon the self. * (See note at end) To do this we need, according to Chopra, a new medicine: one in which mind, consciousness, meaning and intelligence work together to conquer self. He believes that a person may attain "perfect health".  He further develops this theme in another book, “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old.”

The ideas in the book are interesting but didn’t really address what the human spirit is, in this reviewer’s opinion.

Quotes

“If you want to do really important things in life and big things in life, you can’t do anything by yourself. And your best teams are your friends and your siblings.” 

 “Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention.”

“In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.” 

 “The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself.” 

 “The highest levels of performance come to people who are centered, intuitive, creative, and reflective – people who know to see a problem as an opportunity.” 

“Meditation makes the entire nervous system go into a field of coherence.

Does it make sense to talk about a spiritual solution and then define spiritual as mystical?

Maybe Chopra means what he says when he suggests that the spiritual “can be explained by the mystical” suggesting the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender? Calling the spirit mystical seems like he is dodging his own issue?

Is he saying the intellect itself is only physical? If we can take what we learn with us into the next life then the intellect needs to be spiritual as well.

Mysticism is a belief that union with, or absorption into the Deity, is possible; but that implies that the spiritual is not already within us as humans?

If our spirits are within us then we can find the solutions buy building on our spirits to overcome weakness.

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I'd Rather Be Reading, The Delights And Dilemmas Of The Reading Life, by Anne Bogel

 

A little book that we ought to read once or twice a year to really reinforce our love of books. Not that reinforcement is needed but it nice to hear all our own thoughts put so well.

Anne Bogel tells us, no surprise here, that the most common question she gets is “Can you recommend a great book?” The question comes she says, “Because I’m a writer, certified book nerd and all-around bookish enthusiast, people ask me the question all the time.” Her book reminds us that there are “few one-size-fits-all prescriptions for reading life.”

The book offers 21 chapters. I was surprised at how interesting the one on “How to Organize Your Bookshelves” was. Her chapter on “The Readers I Have Been” and “Coming of Age” offer interesting insight into how we change because of what we read, and the one on “Again for the First Time” discusses why a good book, when we return to re-read it, will always have something new to say. It’s not the same book and were not the same reader.

“A good book, when we return to it, will always have something new to say. It's not the same book, and we're not the same reader” 

I suspect that when I re-read this book I will find it different and it will have a new updated message for me, so I plan to do just that.

Quotes

“When we share our favorite titles, we can't help but share ourselves as well. Shakespeare said the eyes are the windows to the soul, but we readers know one's bookshelves reveal just as much.”

“Yet she wondered if her experience was cheapened because she’d read it before she lived it,” 

  “A “great” book means different things to different people.” 

“C. S. Lewis once wrote, “Friendship . . . is born at the moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.” 

Gone Tomorrow, A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child

Early one morning on a nearly empty Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue subway car Jack Reacher notices a woman passenger he suspects is a suicide bomber. She matches the 12-point profile perfectly, but he dismissed the thought. “Not because of racial profiling. White woman are as capable of craziness as anyone else.”  He thought the timing was wrong and that it had “tactical implausibility.”

He was wrong, and it led to him finding himself on the trail leading back to the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

The story takes place mostly in New York City and has an urban poetry in the way the streets and buildings are analyzed like it was just a jungle to traverse using strength and guile to win.

Child continues to surprise us with the twists and turns of his plots but “Gone Tomorrow” , book 13, introduces in an unexpected way how we see evil manifests itself.

See Literary Favorites Section: Lee Child click here

Quotes

“Delta is full of guys who can stay awake for a week and walk a hundred miles and shoot the balls off a tsetse fly, but it’s relatively empty of guys who can do all that and then tell you the difference between a Shiite and a trip to the latrine.” 

“Look, don't see, listen, don't hear. The more you engage, the longer you survive.”

“Delta is full of guys who can stay awake for a week and walk a hundred miles and shoot the balls off a tsetse fly, but it’s relatively empty of guys who can do all that and then tell you the difference between a Shiite and a trip to the latrine.” 

“Look, don't see, listen, don't hear. The more you engage, the longer you survive.” 

""Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in his shoes. Then when you start criticizing him, you’re a mile away and he’s got to run after you in his socks." 

Will The Real Jack Reacher Please Stand Up

Ulysses, by James Joyce

A review in the Economist of Ulysses by James Joyce’s said: “There are two kinds of people. Those that have read "Ulysses" and those that haven't.” Both sides have extreme viewpoints and plenty of passion to fuel their position.  The extreme of one side might remember and celebrate June 16th, the day in which the entire story of "Ulysses" takes place in Dublin of 1904.  Others criticize the book saying it is pornographic, too long or too dense, or both.

Much like Shakespeare, it appeals to both the highbrow and lowbrow with an ongoing study of what it is to be human. The language which might be called a feast of words, also becomes almost noise and patter, but still resonates as poetry. The shear length of the book is daunting, but it allows for ongoing diversities of experiences within the overall story. 

The three main characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly. The characters and events of the novel loosely parallel the events in Odysseus journey home after the Trojan War.

The book is about a single day and begins at 8:00AM where Stephen prepares for the day and heads out. He teaches at a boy’s school, receives his pay and a letter from Deasy, and then goes for a walk on the beach.

Bloom serves his wife Molly breakfast in bed, brings her the mail, and goes to the post office to pick up a letter. At 11:00 AM Bloom attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam with Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and Jack Power.

Bloom wants to publish and advertisement and goes to a newspaper office. Stephen arrives with Deasy’s letter, and the editor agrees to publish it. Bloom walks through Dublin for a while, stopping to chat with Mrs. Breen.

In the National Library, Stephen stops and discusses his theories about Shakespeare and Hamlet with a poet. Bloom arrives, looking for a copy of an advertisement he had placed, and Buck shows up. Stephen and Buck leave to go to a pub as Bloom also departs.

Several meet Simon in the bar of the Ormond Hotel, and later Boylan arrives. Bloom had earlier seen Boylan’s car and followed it to the hotel where he dines. Boylan leaves on his way to his affair with Molly.

Bloom leaves the beach and finds Stephen and several of his friends, all drunk. He joins them and when the bar closes, Stephen and a friend head to a brothel. Bloom later finds him there getting into trouble and he takes him with him.  Later they take a cab head for Bloom’s home where Stephen is invited to stay but he declines and leaves. Bloom goes to bed with Molly and tells her of the day.

Quotes

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” 

“Love loves to love love.” 

“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

 “Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.”

“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.” 

“I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.”

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.” 

Apt Pupil by Stephen King

Kurt Dussander had been at Bergin-Belsen, Auschwitz, and commandant at Patin.  He was now in his 70’s and living in Todd Bowden’s neighborhood.

Todd “looked like the all-American Kid as he pedaled his twenty -six-inch Schwinn with the apehanger handlebars up the residential street.” His 4th grade teacher had written on his report card that he was an “apt pupil”.  His parents cared deeply about him and he seemed to be a fine young man.

Todd had found some old magazines about the Holocaust and became fascinated and obsessed to know more. He went to the library and read all that he could find. He learned about Kurt Dussander, the torture, the death, and the decades-old manhunt. He also learned that this man was living close to his home, using the name Denker. Todd doesn't want to turn him in, he wants to know more. Lots more.

Todd has leverage over Dussander and uses it to learn all that he can, but after enough time passes Dussander gains leverage over Todd for hiding his knowledge of him.  Todd doesn’t exactly change but his harder side seems to be more present. They seem to bring out the worst in each other.

The irony of this story is that it shows that what you read and dwell on changes you and can hurt you.  Is this a message that Steven King really want to tell us?

see literary favorites for more on Stephen King and links to all of his books reviewed on this site

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

Henry Adams was born in Boston in 1838 a great-grandson of the Second President John Adams and grandson of the 6th President John Quincy Adams. He was a professor at Harvard and editor of the North American Review.

 The book ‘The Education of Henry Adams” is an autobiography that focuses on his own and the countries, development from 1838 to 1905. It is a critic of the 19th century approach to education as well as well as many of the political and technological changes that took place between the civil war and the first world war.  

In Chapter 25 he says, “Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts” He then adds that “historians undertake to arrange sequences, called stories or histories, assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect.

 Of the year 1862 and the civil war Henry Adams “could never bear to think without a shudder.'' His father had been appointed as Minister to Great Britain and Henry went with him as a secretary and he experienced first-hand the English governmental feeling that strongly favored the Confederacy.

 ''Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally find it so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe had learned also to love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few.”

Quotes

• “Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.” ...

• “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”

• “Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.” ...

• “No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.”

Never Go Back, A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child

Book Photo Disclaimer: I refuse to post any picture with Tom Cruise in it. How he got to play Jack Reacher in the movies is beyond logical understanding.

“Never Go Back” refers to Reacher’s former Northeastern Virginia headquarters where he served as CO of an elite military police team, but the real reason for going back started out 4 books back, in “61 Hours”, with a flirtatious telephone call to the women who currently has Reacher’s old job, Maj. Susan Turner.  

This book starts out with his returning, but it turns out to be a trap. Someone knew he was coming, and he is forced back into the military, arrested, and charged with homicide and even a paternity suit. At first this seems to just be aimed at getting him to run and never go back. The message is delivered by a couple of tough guys who fail to intimidate Reacher: of course!

Major Turner is also arrested shortly after Reacher arrives. Her replacement seems unqualified and allows a solider in Afghanistan to be killed.

Both Turner and Reacher find themselves locked up in adjacent cells, then escape together, quickly learning that they are both attracted to much more than just their phone voices. Turner thoughts about Reacher seem to reveal a level of lust that is a not seen before in the prior books.

Their escape sends them with little money fleeing West Virginia going cross country to Los Angeles where they investigate the paternity charge. Reacher meets the child who has some striking similarities to him. She is very tall for a teenage girl. They meet in a diner and her backtalk and way of thinking is very much Reacher style.

The plot is spread from a planned meeting with an Afghan tribal leader to LA neighborhoods ,and points between.

see Literary Favorites Section for Lee Child for more on this author and also links to all his books reviewed on this site

Quotes

• “if you can't acquaint an opponent with reason, you must acquaint his head with the sidewalk.” ...

• “How much do you work out?" ...

• “Like they were puppets, and the puppeteer had sneezed.” ...

• “A person either runs or he fights. ...

The 8th Habit by Stephen R. Covey

Covey tells us we move from effectiveness to greatness when we find our voice. That happens when our body, mind, heart, and spirit are all fully engaged in what is most important to us.

If we use our own natural talent it will follow that we will love what we do, and it will be of more interest to us. We will know we are on the right track because an inner voice, our conscience, will confirm it to us.

Covey’s view is that many in business today have either not found their voices or have lost their voices. This happens he says when they don’t serve the whole man only requiring a token of the skills of those who work there. One example of just coasting along is when people just work to fill a bodily need or even addiction. This approach often leaves out the need to fully use one’s talent and creativity.  

For Covey our voice is a good metaphor for understanding.  When we allow our voice to be heard in an organization fully engaged then we resonate our values and goals and it attracts support and builds synergy.  

Quotes

8th Habit Dedication: “To the humble, courageous, “great” ones among us who exemplify how leadership is a choice, not a position.”

“We can take one of two roads in life: One is the broad, well-traveled road to mediocrity, the other the road to greatness and meaning.”

“To know and not to do, is really not to know.”

“people are working harder than ever, but because they lack clarity and vision, they aren’t getting very far. They, in essence, are pushing a rope...with all of their might.” 

When all you want is a person's body and you don't really want their mind, heart or spirit, you have reduced a person to a thing.”“To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground” 

“what is most personal ,is most general.”

 “No matter how long we’ve walked life’s pathway to mediocrity, we can always choose to switch paths. Always. It’s never too late. We can find our voice.” 

The Innocent Man by John Grisham

The Innocent Man, by John Grisham, is based on the true story of Ronald Williamson, an Oklahoma man who had narrowly escaped execution, only to die of liver disease. Williamson's was a star pitcher and catcher on his high school team, drafted by the Oakland A's only to have his career end 6 years later with an arm injury.  John Grisham found this of interest as he had aspired to be a baseball player before dropping out and going into law and then writing.   

Ron returned to his hometown and lived with his mother always believing he would someday return to the big leagues.  Debra Sue Carter was a cocktail waitress who was raped and killed after Ron’s return. The case went unsolved for over 3 years but Ron and a friend of his, Dennis Fritz, were finally arrested for the murder. The only evidence was a statement from Glen Gore who was the person who put Ron at the scene of the crime. Ron was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, while Fritz received a life sentence.

DNA placed Glen Gore at the crime scene, but it didn’t happen until 5 days before the planned execution. Five years later Ron died in a nursing home from cirrhosis of the liver.

Grisham said he bought rights to the story after reading it in the newspaper and it became his first nonfiction book. The story has many of the common themes of Grisham’s novels but the experience of reading it is very different. You miss the dialog of the characters and depend on the updates and reports of what has happened.

Doubleday’s president Stephen Rubin said of the book that it was a natural story for Grisham to write since it had many themes like those in his books, such as wrongful conviction, the death penalty and it was a legal thriller.

I didn’t think it qualified as a legal thriller because the plot wasn’t revealed in dialog through the characters but as news reports of what had happened. 

Quotes

“No star fades faster than that of a high school athlete.” 

“A hundred years earlier, in Hopt v. Utah, the Supreme Court ruled that a confession is not admissible if it is obtained by operating on the hopes or fears of the accused, and in doing so deprives him of the freedom of will or self-control necessary to make a voluntary statement. In 1897, the Court, in Bram v. United States, said that a statement must be free and voluntary, not extracted by any sorts of threats or violence or promises, however slight. A” 

“There’s an old adage in bad trial lawyering that when you don’t have the facts, do a lot of yelling.”

See Literary Favorites Section under John Grishman for more information on this author and links to all his reviews on this site

The Art of T.S. Eliot by Helen Gardner

The Art of T.S. Eliot by Helen Gardner focuses on the poetic style and images of Eliot’s work. The author sees his earlier work only as preparing him for his masterpiece, “Four Quartets”, which she identifies as a turning point in his work.

The real world did not reflect all that Eliot believed about the spiritual world where he saw hope for redemption. His poems were about art, old age, regret and redemption. His hope, in a religious sense, was that the making of art was the highest justification of human life. These are poems of self-examination and regret where art helped fill the need for penance.

Gardner's says of Eliot’s earlier work that he often imitated the voices of other poets but then moves on to a more independent style. He wrote “The Waste Land,” in a way that underscored the musicality inherent in natural rhythms.  This thematic evolution did not overshadow his core ideas which seem best understood in the Quartets.

Eliot’s famous quote: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time,”,

This leaves a question: Did Eliot move onto plays after his poetry because after the Quartets he had nothing left to say? Maybe he really did feel he arrived at where he started?

T.S. Eliot Quotes

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

Do I dare disturb the universe?

The True Life of J.S. Bach, by Klaus Eidam

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician best known in his day as a virtuoso organist as well as a composer. Church music was very important in his day and his music had an enthusiasm and seeming freedom, despite its immense complexities. The music fit together in a way that left many amazed, but others seeing in it reinforce the idea that music is actually revealed.

Klaus Eidam wrote “The True Life of J.S. Bach” and challenges other writers’ thoughts about Bach presenting his image and music as a progressive consequence of the German Enlightenment.

Musicologist Jules Combarieu believed, much like Bach, that music is the “science of thinking in tones” and that harmony is derived from mathematics. Bach implied, and Eidam went further in his writings saying, that harmony comes from mathematics, even before it came into being in music and is defined as a hidden arithmetic movement.

Eidam was deeply moved by Bach’s organ piece, “Toccata and Fugue in D minor.” The piece opens with a toccata section, followed by a fugue that ends in a coda. It is one of the most famous works in the organ repertoire and does leave you wondering how anyone could have written it.

The book concludes discussing musical relationships and suggests that they parallel the rhythm of the cosmos within the deep structure of music.

Quotes

The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.

It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.

As a Man Thinketh, by James Allen →

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Allen’s book, “As a Man Thinketh” starts out :

“Mind is the Master power that molds and makes,

And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes

The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills,

Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills:

He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:

Environment is but his looking-glass.”

The book was published in 1903. Allen described it and was the early leader of the many self-help books that followed.  Drawing insight from Proverbs 23:6-8 in the King James version of the Bible, the book focuses on the power of thought.

The book shows how applying the principle is a choice made by each individual and leads to good and bad conditions resulting from those thoughts.

Allen said it was "A book that will help you to help yourself,” "A pocket companion for thoughtful people,” and "A book on the power and proper application of thought.

Quotes

• "Men do not attract what they want, but what they are."

• "A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts."

• "Cherish your visions. Cherish your ideals. Cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment, of these if you but remain true to them your world will, at last, be built."

• "The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors, that which it loves, and also that which it fears. It reached the height of its cherished aspirations. It falls to the level of its unchastened desires– and circumstances are how the soul receives its own." [4]

• "Men are anxious to improve their circumstances but are unwilling to improve themselves; they, therefore, remain bound."

• a thought precedes "Every action and feeling."

• "Right thinking begins with the words we say to ourselves."

• "Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself."

• "You cannot travel within and stand still without.

Past Tense, A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child

Past Tense, A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child, delivers insight into the Reacher family’s history, going back to the place of birth for his father. The trip leaves him on foot in the middle of rural New Hampshire, walking where he has to choose at a fork in the road between going to Portsmouth or Lacona.

Thirty miles away from the town, a young Canadian couple has car trouble and stops at a small motel buried on a small road in the forest where they are only guests. They find the motel unsettling, and Child leaves us just as uncertain about their fate for much of the book. This is a noticeable change in the past plots that work well.

Reacher finds questionable evidence of his father’s existence, but a 75-year-old assault case named Stan Reacher is called surprising, similar to some trouble Reacher finds in town. He wakes up from a sound sleep from a noise below the threshold of consciousness, prompted to find and help a woman under attack, and gives her assailant a beating. The assailant has a similar profile to the assault cases victim found on his father’s police records.

More connections are found, and they take him, just in time, to the strange motel where the Canadian couple desperately needs him.

This Reacher story has some new plot twists and holds our interest ultimately.

Interesting Items

Someone, somewhere, buys one of Child’s Jack Reacher crime thrillers every 13 seconds. 

Past Tense, published in November, is the 23rd Reacher novel.

The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis →

C.S. Lewis said that we will be transformed in eternity, wherever we eventually go.  “The Weight of Glory” discusses the transformation processes and was presented in 1941 when Lewis delivered a sermon at the pulpit of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford.

“It’s a serious thing,” Lewis says, “to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw them now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.” We’re all immortal and all continue in eternity. Being with God will make us Godlike.  Understanding the “weight of glory” will direct us to be different in how we serve others, but even with that change, getting over the feeling of our selfishness is an important challenge.

Lewis tells us that men today tend to think the highest virtue is unselfishness but explains that the Christians of old would have said it was Love. Replacing Love with the term “unselfish” carries with it the suggestion that the goal is not primarily securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.”

Obtaining this view of glory means that we except that there are no ordinary people, which means we have neve talked to a mere mortal, and that directs us to conduct all our dealings with each other with love. This means that your neighbor is the holiest object you will encounter and an important part of why you’re here.

Lewis says that “almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth, but our real goal is elsewhere.”

Finding the path to glory in how we serve, and love others is much of Lewis’s core message. By following that we take on the weight of a more compassionate vision of Christianity and a different understanding of what true faith and forgiveness is.

Memorable Quotes

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, because by it I see everything else.”

See Literary Favorites Section for more on C.S. Lewis Click Here

One Shot, A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child

Lee Child’s book, “One Shot, a Jack Reacher novel”, is a book you won’t want to put down and is a great read, but it is time to ask why this formula has worked so well over 20++ books? How does this big tough guy, who wanders the country, deals with bad guys and beautiful women, continue to resonate with what seems to be the same old plot?

Reacher now seems so familiar to us that he is like a family member we know very well. We look forward to finding out what our friend is up to now but is the same old plot? Yes and no. It is the same old Reacher but what is surprising is that the plots continue to surprise us in the twists and turns they take, and they continue to be exciting fast paced. You don’t see what is coming.

By comparison I have put down a Steven King novel because I could see exactly what was coming and just wasn’t ready to deal with it. One time it was a couple of months before I wanted to go back, but I did go back. King is still a favorite, but Child’s plots are indeed canny.

Reacher sees the news on TV and learns of the Friday Night Massacre sniper attack and he decides to go to Indiana where James Barr, a former Army Infantry sniper has been arrested for killing 5 people insisting he’s the wrong man: His only request is to “Get Jack Reacher for me.” Barr knew of Reacher when he was in the army year ago.

Barr may want to have Reacher found but that is odd since Barr had been involved in an identical crime back years ago in the military and Reacher wants to make sure that he is convicted of the murders this time. The facts of the crime are solid, and the only real question is how was it possible that Barr didn’t commit the crime as he claimed?

Innocent people are killed, Reacher is framed, and as the police turn against him  he goes underground vowing revenge.  

O yes, by the way, a beautiful woman from his military past shows up, of course.

You really don’t know for sure who the puppet master, #1 bad guy really is until the end. Another good read. Can Lee Child keep this series going?

Top Quotes

“Never forgive, never forget. ...

• “No, I'm a man with a rule. ...

• “I'm not afraid of death. ...

• “I'm not a vagrant. ...

• “He had fallen out of the ugly tree, and hit every branch.” ...

• “I don't care about the little guy. ...

• “I was in the machine. ...

• “A handgun at two hundred feet is the same thing as crossing your fingers and making a wish.”