Baugh: Patriots and Pies -- A Review of Rawles' Patriots

From Tom Baugh, author of Starving the Monkeys:

Patriots and Pies
A Review of the James Wesley Rawles Novel

From time to time we attend gun shows for book signings, and each time we do we hear a chorus of enthusiasm for the revised novel Patriots, by James Wesley Rawles. After waiting for the Christmas shipping rush to subside, I ordered this book in the first days of 2010. After it arrived, in the midst of a record multi-week sub-freezing cold snap in globally-warmed Georgia, I began reading.

A few pages into the fourth edition, I was a little concerned. Fifty or so pages later, I was disturbed by the familiar theme of a well-funded super-group, particularly in these times in which hardly anyone's savings are untouched and many people have been trapped by debt. Some people don't even know whether they will have a home next year, much less be able to store fifty- or sixty-thousand dollars' worth of ammunition alone. But, by the time I finished this book two days later, I could see what people have been raving about. As a friend of mine told me, there is far more good in it than bad. I'm glad I bothered to get past those bumpy parts.

Because then it turned into a great book. With lots of good mini-stories.

I could rave on and on about all the good ideas in this book. Some of these I will highlight later. More importantly, I think, is for the reader to get past some of the unrealistic parts to focus on the actual underlying theme. I'll leave that theme to your imagination when you've read it. So, let's just talk for now about some of the unrealistic parts, and what can be done to overcome these issues. We can even talk about some ideas you might want to write into your own book someday.

Before proceeding to the meat of this review, we need to address a disclaimer. As the author states repeatedly, Patriots is just a work of fiction. Of course, much of fiction is based on reality. Just because Tom Clancy, for example, writes a book about a group of extremists building a nuclear bomb, it doesn't mean that Tom Clancy is telling you how to build a nuclear bomb, or whether you should. Or how to or whether to fly a fully-fueled airliner into a government building. Similarly, neither Rawles' book, nor this review, is advocating a particular course of action. It's all just for fun and should be treated accordingly. As such, portions of this review are written, fictionally, as I would have written portions of that book...

Read the rest.

Got pie?