I started this review last week while filling time waiting for the baby. With
Nothing to Lose hitting the shelves today I thought I should finish it. Is it weird that I now do book reports by choice? I guess it helps when you read the book by choice.
You might be asking yourself "but John, if the book just came out today how could you possibly write a review?" Well for some unknown reason the book is published a full 2 1/2 months earlier in the UK. Luckily someone I know just started working for a UK based company and picked up what was going to be his father's day present on the trip. Of course in true Emmett fashion the father's day present was going to be slightly used after giving it to myself first for father's day. Instead it was slightly used when it was given to me for father's day. It was then slightly more used when my father in law got it for father's day. I know Lee Child is English but I still couldn't make any sense of the 2 month delay. It can't be too hard to change "kerb" to "curb" and "tyre" to "tire". It's not like it was written using the metric system and had to be converted over.
Every year I look forward to the next Lee Child novel and catching up on the adventures of the main character, Jack
Reacher. There's a lot of good authors out there but my two favorite characters right now are Jack
Reacher and Mitch
Rapp (who I blogged about
previously). When my dad told me he and my mom were going to London and were looking for suggestions on where else to go (as in other countries) the only thing that I could think of was to be sure to stop at the bookstore. I was super excited to get to read it before it hit the shelves here. Like a legal form of bootleg.
I came across Jack
Reacher three books ago in
One Shot. I really really liked it and in the book there was a casual reference or two to the his past and I remember thinking I sure hope there are books that talk more about that. Sure enough I dug through my father in law's boxes of books and found
The Enemy. That drove me to the
internet and I found a gold mine, 7 Jack
Reacher novels I haven't read.
Cha ching! I proceeded to read them all before the next one came out.
Nothing to Lose had one thing going for it immediately, it was longer than the last book. Not by a lot but anything will do. The last book was over much too quickly. The other thing Lee Child's books have going for them is Jack
Reacher. It's hard to define why he is so
likeable. He's not overly funny or clever like Myron
Bolitar from Harlan
Coben's novels. He's not incredibly cool and personable like Dirk Pitt in Clive
Cussler's novels. He doesn't have the talent and international intrigue of Gabriel
Allon in Daniel Silva's novels. He certainly isn't a national hero like Mitch
Rapp. Simply put Jack
Reacher is the man.
Reacher hasn't contributed much to the GDP since leaving the Army. He's jobless and homeless. A loner and a drifter. However, he is extremely tough and quite huge (6'5'' 250 lbs). So tough that in a fictional world the only guy I imagine giving him trouble in a fight is Jason
Bourne. But only
Bourne from
The Bourne Identity, not
Supremacy or
Ultimatum when Jason
Bourne was David Webb.
I think it is
Reacher's overwhelming sense of justice that make him so likeable. It ticks him off when anyone is being taken advantage of or if somebody is getting away with a crime. He won't stand for it and he's really good at stopping it. The best line from the book came from the pretty little sheriff
Reacher teams up with when she tells him "You're not a one man justice department." Girlfriend, you obviously don't know Jack
Reacher. He's the judge, jury, and executioner.
Nothing to Lose doesn't disappoint. It opens with four guys trying to bully
Reacher out of town which was a huge mistake, for them. You get plenty of classic
Reacher moments like every minuscule detail about each cup of coffee and the vessel he drinks it from. There are 3 or 4 moments where you stand up and punch the air in satisfaction as justice is served and someone finally gets what's been coming.
I did have a problem to a degree that I haven't had before in Lee Child's books. There was an underlying theme that to me seemed a lot like European propaganda. I'm curious to see if the American version was changed at all and if anyone else got the same feeling as I did. That might explain the 2.5 month delay. The issue was Army deserters. Child didn't come out in support of desertion but his comments on the current situation in American military seemed to condone it. This bothered me but thankfully it wasn't
dwelled upon.
Overall I still recommend it and anything else featuring Jack
Reacher. 4.5/5
Look at the swim setting. Could there be a prettier place to start? There could certainly be a warmer place. With the long and cool spring we've had water temps were still in the 50s. The swimmer in the red sleeves is Casey, passing on a "warm up". We were twins in our wetsuits until he decided he's too much of woos to go sleeveless. Not warming up didn't seem to affect him (see photo of him waving below).
Here I am coming out of the water. I was a little worried about starting in the fourth and final wave that it would be too crowded on the course but it wasn't bad at all. The 6:30 start time meant that the air temperature was not going to help my feet defrost. I had a pathetic first transition (over 4 minutes) as I tried to get all the sand out of my toes and then thought I might be able to rub feeling back into my feet. It didn't work.
The bike course was fast, not much climbing. Thanks to Ann and Scott for the cheers at miles 2 and 17. And also rescuing the racer who seemed to be suffering from hypothermia. Thanks to the Johnson clan for honking at mile 13. And thanks to my wife and kids for at least thinking of me at various points on the course, including as I rode past our front door at mile 11.
The run course is the most spectacular. It's held at Soldier Hollow and the same trails from the Winter Olympics. You can see there is a lot of up and down but not huge elevation gains. The climbs were mostly long and gradual but the descents were steep and short so it was hard to maintain any real fast pace. The start of the run was a very strange sensation. I have done a lot of things with cold/frozen toes. I think I inherited the circulation of my Great Grandma Fife. But I have never run with entire frozen feet. Each step I wondered if I was actually wearing shoes. At mile 2 I started to get some tingling sensations that grew until the point I thought my feet were either on fire or I had hundreds of little rocks in my socks. I had to stop for second and take off my shoe just to make sure it wasn't the latter.
Yes that is Casey standing on the 1st place podium. At it wasn't just our age group, he was the 1st finisher of the citizen race. There were three race categories, Professional, Elite, and Age Group. You can see the results here. I was satisfied with my 7th place out of the 45 finishers in our age group. Next time I won't bother trying to clean my toes. Oh yeah and I'll try to train.
Casey was lucky Ryanne was in town. I told him that if he wasn't trying to show off for his woman he wouldn't be nearly so fast. Just wait until you've been married six years and your wife no longer seems to be impressed. BTW, congratulations to the happy couple. They set a date for October since we last saw them.
I went home and grabbed Jack and went back to Soldier Hollow for the awards ceremony. He loved getting a new hat and eating pizza at the finish line. He looked pathetic though because his dad was in charge of sunscreen and got it all over his eyes. People were wondering why he had tears streaming and yet didn't seem to stop smiling. Which brings me to my final thought on the day. If Baby Sunscreen irritates kids eyes just the same as any other sunscreen then what is the point in buying Baby Sunscreen? Kudos to the marketing department at Baby Sunscreen for selling that. I thought it was like Johnson Baby Shampoo, no more tears. That was very far from the truth. The bottle says "Pediatrician Tested". What the heck does that even mean? I have some stuff in my bag that says "water and sweat proof". That seems like a better sunscreen to me.
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