[.ca] Day Of The Cheetah (ISBN 0425120430)

I Was Not Sold:
I think I was expecting something more from this book. I know he has a large following and has done very well with sales, but I had a hard time placing this guy that high on the mantel. The much better (and unfortunately shorter) version of this theme is Firefox. I usually like a lot of character development, but what we had here was just high school gym chatter. The fighter scenes were not badly written, but it was not enough to save the whole book.

Great Book:
This is my second Dale Brown, and if i can describe this book in one word, the word is ACTION. THe descriptions of Dogfights are very good, and the plot is very good. THe only problem in this book is the date of the History .. 1996 .. and in the book the USSR still exists .. but we can forgive the autor .. because this book was writen in 1989. Great Book ... must Read

GRIPPING!:
This is one of Dale Brown's best achievements. He totaly grips you from the very first page and won't let go until the end of the very last page.

A Truely Great Read:
This was a super read. The touching story of a young cheetah as it struggles to survive after the death of its mother. Kinda like Bambi in Africa. A real MUST READ!!!

...:
It's actually an interesting idea - that we build an airplane that the Russians want to steal. In this case, it's the "Dreamstar", an airplane so maneuverable, it has to be guided by thought impulses. With it's forward-swept wings, it can outfly any other plane. It's only remote competition is a specially modified F-15, the Cheetah, flown by Brown's hero, Pat Mclanahan. Unfortunately, Dreamstar's pilot is actually a deep-plant Russian agent who's not only not above selling out the US, but completely pathological as well. Faced with the prospect of losing his chance to fly the airplane, the mole steals it, touching off a chain of fierce dogfighting and much superpower bickering. The Russians are perfectly craven, but the really annoying charachters are the heroes - teh kind of stalwart guys who know they're in teh right and won't let some stupid bureaucrat or politician get in the way. Almost as bad are the liberals - those who advise the president to wait and see, the kind we're supposed to hate more than the Russians. But the worst of all is the evil Russian spy, another one of Brown's demented villains. An indecisive, or simply inept or insecure villain could have made the whole thing perfectly plausible, and even added some fun to the mix. Instead, it comes off as a cheat (because the unbalanced bad-guy acts without reason, he doesn't require much in the way of charachter development, and also because it keeps the Russians from taking the sort of action that would have given them the plane before the book was half-way complete). We're supposed to overlook these flaws because "Cheetah" is supposed to be realistic, and I'll ahve to wait until some F-15 driver says "that's the way it is". Brown gives his charachters extensive dialog, even when they're supposed to be strapped into jet fighters screaming 50 feet over a the floor of a valley, or trying to evade hostil radar - as if it's no big deal. Brown stages his dogfights from a detached perspective - we know where every fighter is at every time (as opposed to the real world, where that kind of situational awareness is extremely rare). I remember having more fun with my flight sim games - and that was in 1993!! Much better was "Firefox", also about a thought-controlled superfighter getting hijacked.