People send me so many books to review that I’ll seldom fork out my money on books or authors that I’m unfamiliar with. I’m also one of those people that’s incapable of walking out of a bookstore without buying something. Hence, I walked out with Expatriates, my first experience with James Wesley, Rawles.
I was intrigued with this book by all the same things that make men fall in love with their wives- looks, description, and experience. The book looked good, the description sounded wonderful, and the author had a great bio. The combination of all three in one made me want to check it out. Rawles’ bio gave me the thought that the book would be factually accurate and ultra-realistic, and he did not disappoint. The book was a masterpiece and given current happenings on the world stage, incredibly frightening. In case you didn’t know, he’s a former Army intelligence officer and the guru behind Survivalblog.com.
Expatriates follows an economic apocalypse of global proportions and focuses on three main groups of people- a family in Florida, a Christian missionary family in the Phillipines, and an American working in Australia. Through them we see the effects of the economic collapse across three very different spectrums of life. In addition to the fiction elements, portions of the book provide excellent real world resources to find additional survival information.
In the book Rawles also explores the potential for a very real bad guy to come to power should the world change in a bad way, extremist Muslims. These days, everyone is way too politically correct to look at this group of extremists that have been responsible for almost all major terrorist attacks, wars, and changing nation-states for the past several decades. Rawles explores what this group would do in a power vacuum.
I loved the book and became invested in the characters. That’s a huge turn-off in some novels and movies. If I don’t get interested in the characters, I don’t care what happens to them. The only thing that bugs me doesn’t have anything to do with the book. I have no complaints about the book. It’s Rawles’ name that bothers me. For some reason there’s a comma between Wesley and Rawles. I made a cursory Internet search for an explanation, but could not find a reason for the comma.
If this review intrigues you, don’t buy this book. Or at least, don’t buy it yet. It’s part of a series, but it’s not the first book. Look for Patriots and get that one first. Rawles also has non-fiction works available as well.
This message was written by Dr. David Powers. You can always find me at www.drdavidpowers.com. Thanks for reading!
The Center for Apocalyptic Studies 