Marjan's Tooth
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend "Marjan's Tooth" takes you to the mountains of Afghanistan as a Special Forces soldier on a mission of no return. You've been training hard for months on assignment. The leader of your team is the son of Marjan, a warrior whose father was killed by the Taliban and whose death - as well as the death of the great Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance - you've come to avenge. Danger is all around you, a beast of prey. To succeed, you… Product details and pricing info |
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1 Customer Review Posted
- So real, so there, so present...it hurts...ouch!
- Inside the pages of MARJAN'S TOOTH, Tom Maremaa dishes out an amazing travelogue of brutal Afghani warfare, with the expertise of someone who might well have set foot on Afghan soil himself. He'll dare you to think otherwise, and if this here reviewer's not mistaken, :-) , on several occasions I actually felt like it was Tom *himself* as the man orchestrating the various battle scenes -- living the life of Marjan, the Lion of the Panjir, the Lion of the South Asian Zion, the man with the golden gun, with the illustrious name with the reputation to boot! Oho!
Prepare to have your socks knocked off by this killer whale of a tale. Make sure to have a sheet (preferrably white, and without the red stain of the blonde virgin!) suspended somewhere close by if you live in one of the windier climes up North -- like in one of those Scandinavian countries (where the women are "amazing" -- although I doubt they can be much better than our Czech women...yes, I seem to be such a nationalist these days, must be my close proximity to Germany) -- oh yes, those socks...so that you don't lose them! Have the sheet there so that they don't fly away, m'kay?
You can thereby save yourself the few bucks/eurodollars/pounds or Czech/Swedish/Danish/Norwegian crowns it might take to replace them, and have a few extra local clams left over to buy another couple of tasty Amazon Shorts -- preferrably one by this author -- gosh Thomas really knows how to scribble! Stan Lee would be proud. So am I!
Alright, so some more information about this story...this is what you came here for, isn't it? Not to be astounded by my ramblings...
MARJAN'S TOOTH is told in a more journalistic style. Headings and subheadings, the tale of a day in the life of this man, Marjan, who has returned to the country of his birth by way of the US air base created at the fall of the former Nazi Germany, Ramstein, not to mention California.
I had a bit of trouble with the battle sequences. Why you ask? Well, for one, I thought the battlescene violence -- while suitably graphic -- played out much too quickly. By the time you know it, within the blink of a line, a soldier went from a walking two-legged mammal (armed to the teeth, no less, with the lastes in Martin Marietta or Grumman weaponry) to a bloody sullen mess. Again, the violence certainly is appropriate: this *is* Afghanistan, and the battles on that scarred and pocked earth have been legendary. That little riff about Afghani history was amazing. I learned so much within the confines of the single paragraph.
Take p.26 for example -- the scene collapses and comes to a head way too quickly. I felt somewhat more of a build-up might have been more appropriate, because within a flash of tracer fire from The Man's goons and fundamentalist henchmen, some of our most engaging characters in this tale vanished without a trace! It really was...a thing. I'm sure the exigencies of Amazon Short-dom had something to do with all of this. Positive that it did, in fact.
However I still feel it apprpriate to let the author know that he'd have garnered a star-point better (if such a vaunted thing were even said to exist) had he been able to let that scene just play out a bit longer.
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But the "Maremaa magic" doesn't disappoint, folks. Yet again, you can read all about it here.
Five stars. Moving onto the next deal. - 2006-07-17, 1 of 1 people found this review helpful, Rated:
