“A
judicious mixture of rumor and deception, with truth as bait, to
foster disunity and confusion.”
— William
J. Donovan
Every so often I return to read a beloved novel,
something
to
help distract me from the woes of this existence
and provide some level of entertainment and, in some cases, further
enlightenment. I return to Robert Heinlein’s
Stranger in A
Strange Land occasionally,
despite its obsolete and often biased views of “future”
society and other issues. I’ve read aloud J.RR. Tolkien’s
The
Hobbit numerous times to my son when he was of bedtime-story age.
I make the pilgrimage of reading
A Canticle for Leibowitz when
the world seems teetering on (or careening over) the brink of
madness. But I’ve never
before mentioned my guilty pleasure, a series of novels about the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II:
W.E.B.
Griffin’s
Men at War
series.
Given
the stresses of the holiday season combined with <waves hand>
everything else, well, it seemed about time to revisit the
young heroes of the novels and lose myself in their rollicking if not
terribly historically accurate escapades.
