{"id":4175,"date":"2017-05-11T22:06:50","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T02:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=4175"},"modified":"2017-05-11T22:06:50","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T02:06:50","slug":"latest-from-stephen-hunter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/latest-from-stephen-hunter\/","title":{"rendered":"LATEST FROM STEPHEN HUNTER"},"content":{"rendered":"

For months now since I got my early review copy, I\u2019ve been keeping my promised silence, but now at last Stephen Hunter\u2019s latest book \u201cG-Man\u201d is going to officially go on sale May 16.\u00a0 I can only say \u2013 read it!<\/em><\/p>\n

Regular readers here know I\u2019m a huge fan of Hunter\u2019s work.\u00a0 He gets the gun stuff right.\u00a0 He gets the characters right, too. \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In \u201cG-Man,\u201d Hunter creates a character who is a fictional composite of the great manhunters of the early \u201830s who hunts down folks from the Dillinger gang and, in the alternate universe of fiction, ends up facing Baby Face Nelson.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re an NRA member, you\u2019ve seen the current issue of American Rifleman <\/em>magazine that has Hunter\u2019s superb article on the shootout in Barrington, Illinois in which two federal agents and Nelson killed each other.\u00a0 Having accessed hitherto unpublished investigative reports on that shooting, Hunter believes Nelson used a Colt Monitor \u2013 the civilian version of the BAR, the Browning Automatic Rifle \u2013 in that gun battle.\u00a0 In the novel, however, Nelson is armed for that encounter with the Thompson submachine gun that most historians believed he used in that fight.\u00a0 My own research, without benefit of the material Stephen accessed, had pointed more toward a .351 Winchester customized by \u201cgunsmith to the outlaws\u201d Hyman Lebman.<\/p>\n

Fiction demands the proverbial willing suspension of disbelief.\u00a0 Bring some of that to the book, and you\u2019ll love it.\u00a0 Based on the considerable amount that is known of the gunmen involved, Hunter brings them compellingly to life in \u201cG-Man.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the reviewer\u2019s side, I was born in 1948. Both my parents, like all of America during the Depression years, had watched the wild ride of all those early \u201830s \u201ccelebrity criminals\u201d like Dillinger and Nelson.\u00a0 I remembered reading about them in my mom\u2019s detective magazines, which were popular in the \u201850s.\u00a0 Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, and Nelson met their ends from police gunfire in 1934.\u00a0 Those shootings were about 20 years in the past when I first learned of them as a little boy. For perspective, the FBI shootout in Dade County, Florida in 1986 is now more than 30 years in the past, yet today are still widely cited in discussions of ballistics and tactics. So, you can see I was interested before I opened Stephen Hunter\u2019s latest book.<\/p>\n

I can only repeat, Read it!\u00a0 <\/em>It\u2019s one of the best from one of my favorite authors, and I expect you\u2019ll enjoy it, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For months now since I got my early review copy, I\u2019ve been keeping my promised silence, but now at last Stephen Hunter\u2019s latest book \u201cG-Man\u201d is going to officially go on sale May 16.\u00a0 I can only say \u2013 read it! Regular readers here know I\u2019m a huge fan of Hunter\u2019s work.\u00a0 He gets the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4175","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}