Skip to main content

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

When I heard there was a coming bowdlerization of Ian Fleming's works, that our cultural overlords decided James Bond needed to be sanitized[1] for the dainty modern reader, I decided I'd better read some of these novels for myself before they got butchered.

Casino Royale is the first in the series, and it's well-told. The story is laid out at first indirectly, via intelligence reports and flashbacks; then when the action picks up, the author tells the story in real time. The book is better in some ways than the movie(s), not least because the written James Bond is a more credible character than the movie version[2]. Rather than the Mary Sue we know from the movies, here Bond is believably human: beset by doubts, uncertainties, even unease.

There's one silly deus ex machina event in the story, but it's made up for by an unexpected twist ending. All in all a readable, solidly three-out-of-five stars book. It won't change your life but it passes the time. 


[1] Yes, it's true, sadly. The institution that owns the rights to Fleming's work employed "sensitivity readers" to look through and remove anything "offensive."

[2] Unfortunately the movies have permanently altered my internal narrator: my brain plays Sean Connery's voice in my head for all of Bond's dialog. A similar thing happened to me when reading Arnold Schwarzenegger's (unexpectedly interesting) autobiography!

More Posts

For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization by Charles Adams

Wide-ranging historical survey looking at major world civilizations through the lens of taxation and tax policy. It's a good read, a great review of world history, and it gets you to think about that history in a refreshingly unusual way. I've said elsewhere that one cannot understand history properly without some grounding in monetary history . Add tax history to the list! The author makes a robust argument that many if not most political instabilities and revolutions largely emerge out of resistance to punitive taxation. Likewise, this book will help deprogram readers away from the many schoolbook historical narratives we carry around, like the hypersimplified " Just say slavery " narrative of the American Civil War, or the pro-government narrative of the Whiskey Rebellion as "Federal law and order prevailed over frontier tax cheats." It is a surprisingly sentimental and romantic intellectual experience to hear the author describe bygone eras like the ...
Read more

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

History of the cod fishing industry across more than a millennium. The author begins with 10th century Viking and Basque explorers, and takes the reader on a roundabout journey right up to the modern era of global fishing moratoriums. In some ways this book is all over the place, its narrative at times only loosely connected to the cod industry, sometimes not at all. But it's okay: just enjoy the ride and let the author share what he knows. Which turns out to be a pretty interesting history on a subject you'd never expect would be so interesting. Each chapter has a postscript with one or two codfish recipes from a range of cultures and eras, some dating as far back as the 15th century. Once again it's more interesting than you'd expect: the preparation methods, the cuisine styles, even the recipe writing styles of these different eras. It adds an extra something to the book. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if...
Read more

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker

A book about heeding the miraculous cognitive process we call intuition, "a brilliant internal guardian" that enables us to perceive things before they happen. This book give you a tremendous set of tools for assessing risks, making predictions, and understanding which things you should (and shouldn't!) be afraid of. This book is a wonderful navigational tool for modernity. I'll add that aside from being an insightful guy, author Gavin de Becker is quite an interesting guy. I recommend digging into any of the podcasts or long-form interviews he's done. See for example  this interview with Tucker Carlson , striking in part because Carlson (for once) hardly talks--he simply lets de Becker talk. [Again, please skip or skim these notes below, they are too long and life is short!] Notes:   Chapter 1: In the Presence of Danger 1) "Like every creature, you can know when you are in the presence of danger. You have the gift of a brilliant internal guardian that stand...
Read more