Forbes Books

The photography is top notch! Each chapter describes a different adventure in a different place and was written by a different member of the Forbes entourage. Some are really well written. Others are a little amateurish but hey, they're not supposed to have been written by professional writers!

Why does this book only rate 2 stars? Because all but ONE chapter couldn't be more obsequious. There is so much butt kissing and boot licking in each tale that my tongue felt dirty reading it. It's too obvious that the authors were putting on their best manners in thanking their executive host for trips on which it was clear that they retained their corporate ranking.

As a motorcyclist myself, I concluded that Malcolm Forbes was not a person I would have liked. Motorcyclists have a Three Musketeers "one for all and all for one" attitude when we're out for a ride. We take care of each other. If one of us has a problem, we all stop and pool our resources to help them. Not Malcolm. There was one ride during which they encountered a puddle the size of a lake. Malcolm BLASTED through it. He made it. Others didn't. He just kept going. On another ride one by one, members of the group ran out of gas. Again, Malcolm just kept going. He "almost" made it to the destination hotel. He ran out of gas just across the street but couldn't turn into the lot because of the divided highway. A crowd had gathered to see the famous bazillionaire so he waved for them to push him to the turnaround and back to the hotel (it was well over 100* with oppressive humidity) just so he could boast and rub it in to the others that he had RIDDEN the whole way. Yet another chapter tells of how one of the governments wouldn't allow him to fly over their country but he insisted and insisted and insisted until he got his way. "How DARE they refuse me? I'm Malcolm Forbes!" Only one of the chapters comes right out and shows Malcolm's true colors -- but it's written so charmingly and tongue-in-cheek that most don't even realize that he's painting Malcolm in his true stripes.

It's a beautifully laid out coffee table book with superb photography. Skimming through here and there will probably not result in the need for mouthwash. But to sit down and read it... keep a bottle of Scope nearby.

Apparently, the wife of the minister of security has gone missing near some mysterious village, Carpford. Tweed and his people investigate the disappearance, against the wishes of the minister. The town is full of mysterious people, and somehow, Tweed and his people see a connection between this and the arrival of Muslim terrorists in England (they're wearing turbans; they must be terrorists). Al Qaeda is planning an attack on London, and Tweed must stop it.

"The Cell" should have been a good suspense novel/political thriller, but it's not. It just goes from one uninteresting scene to the next. Tweed and his people talk about the terrosit threat, they visit Carpford. They go back to headquarter. Back to Carpford. Paula Grey and some Belgian agent goes to Italy to talk to some person. They go back to Carpford. More people disappear. And so on and so on without anything interesting happening. It gets boring pretty quickly. You'll be better off reading something else. Not recommended.

This book was kind of boring. We read it in our english class. IT took a long time to get a plot

Most illustrations are from large operations, not much in there for a novice and small projects, very little detail steps.
I have a little experience with fiberglassing and repair and hoped this would help me further, but need to find something with more detailed instruction and illustrations.

I have very high regard for Mary Kay Ash, but the writer of this book is ridiculous. She was hired to write Mary Kay's principles of living a rich life and I cannot believe that Mary Kay ever would have suggested watching the financial reports on the news and saying "hmmm" as you watch to make yourself look interested so that your husband will be impressed. This is an actual suggestion from the book. I'm not sure I can finish this book.

This is the first Colin Forbes book that I have had to endure. His characters read like they were lifted from a fourth-grader's cartoon. The dialogue was so hollow and so cliched that it had an incongrously comical effect. I was consistently reminded of the skits on the improv tv show, "Who's line is it anyway?". The plot was predictable to the point of annoyance. The narrative was pedantic and generally insulting to my intelligence. This is the worst book that I have ever come across in my entire life. After gritting my teeth through the first hundred pages or so, I had to put it down. One more line of this caricature thriller, and I would have ripped off my own head and eaten it, such was my desperation.

This is the first time I have put down a book without finishing it. Puerile dialogue. If I had read once more about Paula saying something "merrily" I would have thrown up. Very jolly hockey stockings early 50s British kids books' dialogue. How the hell did Marler have all those contacts with arms dealers (presumably illegal)and yet Alvarez could provide licences immediately Marler returned to the hotel? Come on Colin! Until I stumbled briefly onto this I thought that The Devil's Teardrop was the worst book I had ever read and I finished that one. Apologies to Jeffrey Deaver but Colin Forbes' effort leaves yours for dead.

My second attempt at a Colin Forbes novel. I must put it down midway through the book. Unbelievable characters and childish narrative. A thriller? I think not.

My second attempt at a Colin Forbes novel. I must put it down midway through the book. Unbelievable characters and childish narrative. A thriller? I think not.

In this typical Colin Forbes thriller, a billionaire industrialist called Vincent Bernard Moloch with concerns in the US, the UK and Middle East, and the director of the worl'ds biggest multinational called AMBECO, invents a new type of explosive called Xenobium. Supposedly more powerful than the A-bomb, Moloch makes a point of demostrating it with spectacular results and a view to selling it to Middle Eastern nations for military use. So who is there to stop him? Enter the British MI6's finest gourmet-loving, champagne-drinking, well-dressed secret agents Tweed, Paula Grey and foreign correspondent Bob Newman who infiltrate AMBECO and discover that the madman's plans are bigger than they realise. And as they fight off killers in speedboats, a loony employee of AMBECO with a mother fixation and use sniper Marler to pick out the bad guys(isn't it convenient he can buy all the arms he needs anywhere in the world! ), they still find the time to dine at the best parties! And the narrative contains some hilarious lines. For instance:

(p169): 'And he paid them very well. I don't know how much, but they started appearing in more expensive clothes.'

(p265-266): (referring to a courier delivering essential documents) 'They will reach you in seven hours time.' 'Seven hours? How are they coming? By rocket?' 'I've got government co-operation. They must be using one of their incredible new supersonic aircraft.'

Enough said. But on the book's finer points, it is a very good, if somewhat familiar story, and the pacing is fast and action never stops until two explosive climaxes in California and Cornwall. Worth a read, at least Colin Forbes's novels have a knack of being extremely entertaining, if somewhat in the wrong way, which is notable in his later books.

Like Janus, this book had two faces, one bad and one ugly. I do not mind it if an author is going to pass off an old, well-used story line on us - this is the spy mole hunt with the odd pairing of hinters, but you have to make it interesting. We just kind of moved through this book at a plodding pace that never picks up, the characters are so weakly described that you really never care to find out what happens. I heard he was a good author so I struggled through to the end, but I now regret the lost time.

This book could have been much, much better if Forbes would have described better his characters. The story is about a Russian spy known as Balkan, who is the head of one of the European headquarters of the SIS. The chief of the European sector, Tweed, tries to find out, who the black sheep is. His help is a newswriter called Newman who is actually his bodyguard. The plot is too simple and the characters don't really have "faces". If we forget about this, the book is good, readable, but not so much enjoying. That's the cause of the 2 stars.

I found this in my university bookstore and bought it because it made me laugh. It's full of pre-revolutionary Russian grammar rules and letters that Lenin removed from the language in 1917.

While my Russian professor and I laughed at this book, it's not worth buying for any reason except to laugh at - or if you're really curious about the changes that have been made to the Russian language over the last 100 years.

If you're looking for something to help you with a Russian class, or to help you learn Russian, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK.

This is a reprint of a grammar manual that was published before the Russian Revolution, with a few lines of modern editing(in a different typeface). The author was a professor at Oxford. The Cyrillic alphabet used in this book contains a few obsolete characters. It is quite surprising that REA let this slip through.

The prose is quaint, but that's about the only thing worth mentioning of this book. The characters and plot are so preposterous that an elementary school child wouldn't come up with them, and in Forbes' universe people in 2003 are still using typewriters instead of computers, and half of the technology seems to be directly from the 1960s. How anyone thought this would be worth printing is beyond me.

This book is merciless. We are treated to a parade of cardboard characters, stilted dialogue and dubious plotting.

This book has all the charm of an IRS audit.

This is one of the worst thrillers / mysteries I have read. The characters are unbelievable, the dialogue is exceedingly disappointing .. what else can I say?

Some 30 years ago, Forbes was among the top thriller writers going. I highly recommend such titles from the 70's and 60's as TRAMP IN ARMOR or HEIGHTS OF ZERVOS. But in the past few decades he seems to have sadly gone downhill, particularly in this ongoing series with Tweed. The dialogue is unbelievable, the villains are cardboard, and the action seems to follow no rule of logic or deduction. What this reminds me of is such pulpish work as Sexton Blake or Doc Savage.

Purchasing this book made me face the risks associated with online book purchases. Forbes' subject of analysis seems to keep eluding her, and that pursuit comes across as the only continuing thread of the book. Early references to "the rhetoric of redemptive violence" quickly blurred into a discussion of "righteous violence," "natural right," Black "manliness" and agency. The point is not that these aren't worthy topics of discussion; to the contrary, they clearly have salience for Forbes. The problem is that Forbes spends so much time engaging in polemics that she fails to expose her analysis of these topics in a way that shows her readers what connections she'd like us to draw from them. And the continuing train of malapropisms and gavel-banging only served to distract this reader's attempt to forge the necessary connections. All to say, if I knew then (when I ordered the text) what I know now I would have used my library card instead of my credit card.