Archive for December 2008
Broken Under Interrogation, By Jeffrey M. Hopkins
The Cover of the riveting Broken Under Interrogation.
Yo. Here is the cover of Broken Under Interrogation, written by me, Jeffrey M. Hopkins and published independently (that means by me) using the company Booksurge LLC.
If you want to know what it is about, here it is in a nutshell.
A young man joins the army to run away from a situation in which he is going nowhere, he is well trained and heads off to Iraq to serve his country. In Iraq, he lives with a group of Iraqi men performing an intelligence functionality. They teach him much more about life and his job than he could ever teach them. He loses his innocence in Iraq. Upon returning from Iraq, and his dismissal from the Army for psychological reasons, he returns to his rust belt hometown to find it drowning in dope and hopelessness. He takes it upon himself to use his training in the “Iraqi methods” to collect intelligence on, track, kidnap, and torture drug dealers.
Broken Under Interrogation could glorify war. It does not. It is a scream from hell. The hell of the Global War on Terror. The hell at the periphery of the American dream, that place of white picket fences, SUVs, megastores, peace, freedom, and security – and the American nightmare of prisons, security at any cost, and endless war.
I urge anyone with an inkling of curiosity to read the book for themselves.
Broken Under Interrogation is available at Amazon.com, and bookstores everywhere.
Broken Under Interrogation
Broken Under Interrogation is published by Booksurge Publishing, LLC.
This is my first novel, published in July 2008 by Booksurge Publishing. In it I compare the “War on Terror” in Iraq to the “War on Drugs” in the inner city slums of the United States. Both are fueled by grinding lack of opportunity, that form a self sustaining raison d’etre for the security forces in their battles with these gangs of young impoverished men. The two phenomena were just too similar for me to ignore. Couple that with a rage that grew inside me since I came back, and you will realize that this book was therapeutic. If you want a glimpse inside from someone who has been there, read “Broken Under Interrogation”. If you enjoy reality smacking you about the face and don’t go for the escapist fare try it out. But don’t take my word for it, take Kirkus Discoveries word for it.
AS PUBLISHED BY KIRKUS DISCOVERIES REVIEWS:
Former Army intelligence officer John Powers, back in the States from Iraq, is arrested after a vigilante campaign to rid his neighborhood of drugs and undergoes a series of brutal interrogations in this nihilistic screed set in the near future.
Utilizing only skeletal conventions of the novel structure, Hopkins sets the scene with Powers’ long, anger-fueled, stream-of-consciousness rants and flashbacks, as the protagonist endures torture sessions at the hands of a corporate police force. Powers attempts to figure out why this is happening to him in a society whose benign legal system is well-established. He also can’t understand why he is being targeted when his methods, while admittedly illegal, are far more efficient at reducing drug trafficking than prior police procedures. While there is too much “tell” and not enough “show” in Hopkins’ book, his style draws chilling and effective comparisons to Orwell, Kafka, Nietzsche and Rand—an estimable group whose themes and narrative approach overlap in telling fashion here.
Powers is an intriguing character—a product of a rough childhood whose school-of-hard-knocks survival skills and native smarts make him an ideal candidate for intelligence work once he lands in the service. But while he seems destined to become the sort of sociopathic soldier that sometimes blossoms under the brutal conditions of war, Powers instead develops a curious and humanitarian empathy in the well-told anecdotes of his time in Iraq. It’s after Powers is arrested that his military training and innate decency provide a fascinating conflict, as he is subjected to the disturbingly violent methods of Garrett Moore—the whatever-it-takes philosopher heading the corporate police. These sections pare the story to its essence and define a novel that is decidedly not for the squeamish.
A novel that asks what torture is, how far it can go and why society allows it as a means to an end.
You can obtain “Broken Under Interrogation” here in trade paperback form.
Or here in Amazon Kindle Form for the ridiculously low price of $3.99
http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Under-Interrogation/dp/B001L4LHV0/ref=ed_oe_k
