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Kingdom (2019)

5.4 (5 Ratings) Rate It

Movie

Orphaned by war, Li Xin (Yamazaki) dreams of rising from his low status in life as a servant boy by...

Fragrant Orchid: The Story of My Early Life

Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Fujiwara Sakuya and Chia-ning Chang

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Book

The acclaimed actress and legendary singer, Yamaguchi Yoshiko (aka Li Xianglan, b. 1920), emerged...

Phil Leader (619 KP) rated Dragon (Dirk Pitt #10) in Books

Nov 12, 2019

At the end of the Second World War, America sends more than two atomic bombs to be dropped on Japan, but the other planes crashed. Fast forward fifty years and against a backdrop of US paranoia about the rise of Japanese industry, it seems that at least one of those missing bombs has been found.

Dirk Pitt must race against the clock to uncover the fate of the weapons and what use they may be put to. And not all of his foes are human.

It has to be said you generally know what you are going to get with a Cussler book and this is exactly what you get. There's a villainous bad guy who wants to destroy America, almost insurmountable odds, incredible chases and ingenious escapes.

The whole is equal to the sum of its parts, so this is a completely standard Pitt adventure novel, but there are many of those parts that aren't quite up to scratch. With the fall of the Soviet Union as the Enemy Nation, Cussler has transferred this status to Japan, but it doesn't really work very well and comes across as more than a little xenophobic. And the threats aren't particularly threatening. By this point the plot twists that made the earlier novels so intriguing are basically absent with very little happening that isn't signposted. So although it's a standard Cussler thriller, it isn't anywhere near being one of the best