The Aardvark Is Ready for War

by James W. Blinn and J. B. Priestley

Book Overview

In the great American tradition of subversive war novels, The Aardvark Is Ready for War is a tour de force black comedy about one man's adventure inside the techno-military machine as he ships out... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560255463
• ISBN13: 9781560255468
• Release Date: July 2003
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 and higher

Customer Reviews

A latter-day "Catch-22"

Though it is not as good as "Catch-22", this novel sparkles with sassy dialogue, military argot and flashy gadgets, becoming, in the process, an authentic account of the technologised conflict which was the Gulf War. It implies how, in the light of how life today is dominated by digital satellite technology, camcorders and computers, everyone has assumed the role of voyeur. The anonymous narrator is a recruit enlisted to fight in the "hyperral" Gulf War crisis, in which, by virtue of the hi-tech surveillance equipment employed, the perception of a thing becomes a way of "manipulating" it. The book is stuffed with borrowings from such postmodern epigones as Baudrillard, and is far more philosophically complex than one might expect, though redeemed also by its irreverent humour.

A thinking mans view of the war

This book captures the twisted and often ridiculous views and actions from our little adventure in the gulf. Read this if you really want to know what the military is like from a logical perspective......excellent.

entertaining and original

Linn has read a bit too much Jean Baudrillard (who he quotes up front) but that's okay, this book is ambitious as hell. At a time when most writers are retreating to small town fables or "historical" fiction, Linn wrestles with late 20th century weirdness and succeeds with a highly entertaining and original book. Don't pray for the movie--this book is way too internal to make it to the screen. It's too bad that Little and Brown didn't put a bit more marketing muscle behind this book. Maybe someone will get smart and put it out in paperback, but I'd act now and get yourself a nice, new first edition before they all run out.

It's Not about war, it's about Amerika. . . .

If you want a war book read Tom Clancy. This book is about everything crackpot Amerikan as difracted through the prism of the Gulf War. The publisher compares it to Joseph heller but really it's more Don Delillo meets Kurt Vonnegut through a wormhole on the backside of the looking glass. Toss in some Celine and the bastard son of William Burroughs and Jean Baudrillard. Stir well and take in one gulp. The funniest, most sarcastic parody I've read since 'Infinite Jest'. The first fun ontological novel. Must be read to be believed. AND, {added benefit) reading it will make you smarter. Pray for a movie. That's all I say, just pray for a movie.

An updated Catch-22

This book, set on a US aircraft carrier and its various ports of call en route to the Persian Gulf on the verge of the outbreak of the recent shooting war there, delicately describes the spiraling breakdown of- well, of everything. Narrated by a gas-masked (i.e. aardvarked) naval officer, alternately seen through his eyes and through the lens of the video camera he always carries with him, it delineates the descent into barbarism of his fellow-soldiers, contrasting the decay of human and humane relationships with the vast technological edifices which they live in and control (or pretend to control). This is nothing particularly new, but Blinn provides an unusually complex narrator, torn between detachment and compassion, and does an especially good job of motivating the world he shows- decay is not accidental, but is rather a necessary, even vital force. Layers of representation and ambiguity- be they sexual, racial, or, even more fundamentally, of simple identity- ! build throughout the book, showing the reader a world which is eminently entertaining in its absurdity and compellingly disturbing in its instant recognizability as our own.