{"id":1508,"date":"2018-12-20T15:33:49","date_gmt":"2018-12-20T14:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=1508"},"modified":"2018-12-20T15:33:49","modified_gmt":"2018-12-20T14:33:49","slug":"review-night-of-camp-david-by-fletcher-knebel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/review-night-of-camp-david-by-fletcher-knebel\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Night of Camp David, by Fletcher Knebel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The story about this book goes something like this: Published in 1965 and a best-seller at the time, this was not Fletcher Knebel&#8217;s best work.  That would be <em>Seven Days in May<\/em>, a successful thriller about a military coup d&#8217;etat in the United States, later made into a film.  <em>Night of Camp David<\/em> was deservedly forgotten for several decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then its copyright owners noticed, somehow, that sales of used copies were soaring.  There was a demand for the book.  Why?  Because the basic premise is that the President of the United States is insane.  Crazy, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So Vintage Books decides to re-brand the book with a new cover, all in black, without the title or author name (Knebel is no longer a household name anyway) and puts this instead: &#8220;What would happen if the President of the U.S.A. went stark-raving mad?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It probably worked.  Sales are no doubt going well.  I was even tempted to buy a copy myself, and did.  But my advice to you is: don&#8217;t.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is book of its time, with shallow, two-dimensional cut-out characters, full of casual sexism, a plot that plods and what may be the most unsatisfying ending ever written to a political thriller.  A missed opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The story about this book goes something like this: Published in 1965 and a best-seller at the time, this was not Fletcher Knebel&#8217;s best work. That would be Seven Days in May, a successful thriller&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1509,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1510,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508\/revisions\/1510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}