About Books and Movies

Atomic Blonde is one of the coolest spy fantasy movies ever, stylized to the hilt, and with a soundtrack to evoke nostalgia for the good old days towards the close of the Cold War.  To contrast it with gritty espionage realism, read Le Carre's The Looking Glass War.

If seeing the beginning of the Lebanon War experiemced by men inside an Israeli tank supporting a platoon of paratroopers sounds intense,  you're right - Lebanon is a tightrope of a movie, reflecting the predicament of the tank crew. A parallel literary experience is Norman Mailer's classic dive into the minds of a platoon on a fictional South Pacific island called The Naked and the Dead, which is always high on the lists of classic war novels.Incidentally, some of the themes of Mailer's book fit onto the Australian 'mopping up' campaign in Papua.