![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/theyearofthedragon.jpg\")
I read Kung Fu: The Way of the Dragon<\/a><\/em>; I read Kung Fu #2: Chains<\/a><\/em>; I read Kung Fu #3: Superstition<\/a><\/em>. So it would make sense for me to pick up this book, Kung Fu #4<\/em>, ainna?<\/p>\nOh, but no: The first were tied into the David Carradine television series, as demonstrated by his picture on the cover. This book, however, is not<\/em> that Kung Fu<\/em>, it’s Kung Fu featuring: Mace<\/em>, although they’re happy if you made that mistake and bought this book.<\/p>\n Joe at Glorious Trash started his review of the book<\/a> thus:<\/p>\n Joseph Rosenberger turns in another installment of the Mace series, and thank god there\u2019s only one more Rosenberger volume to go. Seriously, The Year Of The Dragon is a straight-up beating of a novel, mercilessly pounding the reader into a lethargic stupor of boredom. Now let me tell you all about it!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Seriously, that poor fellow is quite the scholar of mid-century men’s adventure fiction; he has even read all the books in this series<\/a> and has written lengthy essays on each. So if you want smaht<\/em>, go read that. I echo his sentiments.<\/p>\n You can see from the edge, where I purposefully cropped wide, that I flagged a lot of stupid things in the book. The ethnic slurs: Oh, my, yes, the most baddest word appears, but so do slurs for different ethnicities and nationalities–according to Joe, this is standard practice for the author, Joseph Rosenberger, whose The Death Merchant #7: The Castro File<\/a><\/em> and COBRA #2: Paris Kill-Ground<\/em><\/a><\/em> I did not like either.<\/p>\n Okay, okay, okay, here’s a bit about the book: The Kung Fu Master, Mace, a Shaolin monk sort of helping the CIA helps the CIA and the Red Chinese when an art treasure stolen from mainland China is brought to Seattle to move to a collector in Argentina. Two local brokers pair with a connected longshoreman to try to ship it on a freighter, but Mace and the Communist Chinese forces go through a series of set pieces looking for the art object and a series of chapters of discussing what they should do next. So it’s slow reading punctuated by very turgid “fight” scenes replete with a number of italicised<\/em> Oriental-sounding strikes that the author might have looked up in a martial arts book of the era, and a whole lot of exclamation points! (I picked this book up as I was reading Patty E. Thompson’s books<\/a> which also feature a lot of exclamation points–brothers and sisters, I think I am done with my annual reading quota of exclamation points through 2022!)<\/p>\n But, yeah, the fight scenes are turgid and unbelievable. The Kung Fu Monk kills a lot of people with a single blow, and although he ends up in a pile of corpses, there’s no mention of stumbling or stepping around the piling bodies. He kills a man with the Tao te Ching<\/em> at one point–maybe even Tai Chi Walking somewhere–but throughout the word Tuh<\/em> appears, which I suspect is the phoneticish spelling of Tao. Which is spelled Tao<\/em> a couple of times. Oh, and it mentions Mace, the Kung Fu monk, taking out a bunch of bad guys quickly–in a minute and a half. Gentle reader, a minute and a half in a fight situation is a long time. My dojo’s sparring rounds are about a minute and a half, and when that time slows down when you’re advanced enough, it’s a lot of time. Of course, I’ve never killed anyone with a single strike before, and I’ve only been killed by a single strike twice (I got better).<\/p>\n And the set pieces, oh, geez. They have fight scenes, but they do not advance the plot<\/em> except that they provide another place where the MacGuffin is not. But they are inclusive! When Mace and the Red Chinese sidekick attack a freighter, it’s a multi-ethnic crew of the sort of stereotypes that do no actually serve on freighters<\/em>. Ach.<\/p>\n So, oh, yeah, this book is awful. But I read the whole thing. Because I’m hard up for completed books in my annual list (this is the only my 90th book this year so far), but mostly because I am a sadist.<\/p>\n Not as much of a sadist as Joe at Glorious Trash. Or not as much of a serious student of the genre.<\/p>\n I will say, though, that when searching “Death Merchant” book report<\/a>, I came up with two recent Good Book Hunting posts. I was relieved to discover that I bought Lee Goldberg’s novel in the Diagnosis: Murder<\/em> series, The Death Merchant<\/em>, both at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library spring book sale<\/a> and on our trip to It’s a Mystery book store in Berryville, Arkansas this summer<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yeah, Joseph Rosenberger books: Do not want.<\/p>\n I get a little money if you click here and buy:<\/p>\n Normally, I would post a link to the Amazon item here, but can you believe that this naughty book is not available on Amazon or Ebay? C’mon, man. I am probably on a watch list for reading it. And you read this review.<\/em> Don’t try to say you didn’t “Download” hate material; every time you visit a Web site, you “download” its contents regardless of whether you meant to, whether it was what you sought, or whether it was even visible to you.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I read Kung Fu: The Way of the Dragon; I read Kung Fu #2: Chains; I read Kung Fu #3: Superstition. So it would make sense for me to pick up this book, Kung Fu #4, ainna? Oh, but no: The first were tied into the David Carradine television series, as demonstrated by his picture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29118"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29123,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29118\/revisions\/29123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}