Review: MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors

MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a 4-star review.

I was a big fan of the TV show as a kid. At least, I really liked the early seasons. I didn't see the movie for many more years but liked it as well.

The book was a different experience. It attempts to be a "year in the life" sort of book with what are effectively a series of vignettes that follow our heroes over their tour in Korea during the Korean War*. There isn't really an overarching story being told across the various chapters.

Most of those stories end up in either the movie or the TV series. At least, all of the better stories end up in some sort of video format - and sometimes both!

The primary problem with the book is that the number of hijinks that our heroes experience over the course of a year seems to be far too great for only two US Army doctors to achieve over such a short period of time. The author indicates in the preface that Hawkeye and Trapper John are really amalgamations of a larger number of doctors.

But as a single narrative, it's hard to believe that two doctors drink that much, conduct extended surgery sessions that much, and make side trips to so many other places within a single year.

It would be interesting to encounter this book without having had prior exposure via the TV series or the movie.

People that enjoyed the early years of the series but not the later years should enjoy this book. People that didn't enjoy the early years but liked the later years probably will not enjoy this book.

*I know. "conflict" - "police action" - nonsense. Men and women died in huge numbers fighting against enemy armies. It was a war.

View all my reviews

Review: Terms of Enlistment

Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star review. It's a weak 3 stars.

Read this some time ago, but had not reviewed it. The story wasn't terribly memorable. As I recall, it had some anti-Starship Trooper elements. Or at least it was trying to subvert the ST narrative in some way.

A couple of plot points stood out to me.

One was that so many people were basically being warehoused. They received a subsistence level of money from the government. Their access to good food was poor. And there was precious little explanation of how this came to be and how it was sustained.

Downstream from the inexplicable economics was the suggestion that people should just take what they wanted as well as the suggestion that those people had no options in which they could demonstrate their usefulness to humanity by pursuing meaningful work.

The second was that the author made the unforgivable mistake of conflating an "assault rifle/weapon" with a semi-automatic rifle. Being a veteran, he should know better.

The unexplained economics were a much larger problem.

There are better works of MilSF out there. Pursue them instead of this.

View all my reviews