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Last Man Standing

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Eins der besten Bücher, die ich je gelesen habe. Selbst wenn die deutsche Version herauskommen sollte, würde ich die englische lesen, da die Sprache einfach einzigartig wirkt.
Das Buch fängt interessant an und wird im Laufe der Zeit immer besser...Ständig Wendungen im Geschehen, die man nie erwartet hätte. Das Buch überzeugt von der Ersten bis zur letzten Seite.
Spannend, überraschend, fesselnd und absolout überzeugend !!!

David Baldacci has proven once again that he is a master of storytelling. From the moment go, Last Man Standing left me yearning for page after page, gripping me to the last word of the book.
Baldacci's attention to detail (which suggest enormous research and preparation for each book) and insight into the FBI and HRT made me believe that I was seeing and living everything. After Wish You Well, I was dying for a real thriller. Therein lies his strength.
An excellent read for David Baldacci fans and those who like great storytelling.

The Last Man Standing, Web London, is the hero of this story. He is not just a man, he is a highly trained and brave member of HRT at FBI.
Baldacci shows part of the life of a HRT member. He shows some techniques, how an assault team is trained and how they force their enemies to either give up or to die.
The plot switches in three different actions. One being the childhood of Web, one the short past and the last one his actual order. In his short past he is the only survivor of his team and he is driven by anger to find out, who has killed his friends from HRT.
The book never gets boring and at the end I have asked myself, why it was the last page.
Be careful because HRT does not rescue you from not lying the book down and getting to less sleep.

I found this novel by Baldacci quite different to his previous books. It was too violent for me, and the first half of the book spent too much time describing the military hardware (guns, tanks, rocket launchers, etc) used by the characters involved. I found it hard to get enthusiastic about this.

Having said that, once I made it through that, it became much more exciting, and had the "cant put down" feeling that most of Baldacci's other books have!

The first Baldacci novel I read, and so far the best one I have read. I literally could not put the book down, it was fast-paced, riveting and always high on adrenaline. Not just the action, also the psychological consequences and backgrounds make this book a worthy read.

Highly advisable.

Caution: The Last Man Standing is not for the squeamish or those who have nightmares about what they read. The book has many scenes of extreme violence and mayhem aimed at good guys and bad. The book's language is also laced with virtually every common swear word that you know.

What differentiates Last Man Standing from the standard shoot-em-up thriller is that Mr. Baldacci explores the mind as much as he does the physical. Providing that context makes the book more intense, meaningful, and complex.

The book's hero, Web London, is also someone you will find interesting and admirable. At his job as a Hostage Rescue Team assaulter for the FBI, he is bold, brave, and extremely capable. But, it has come with a price. He has an unattractively reconstructed face from wounds that makes him seem like Frankenstein to some, a body covered with bullet scars, and no family life. As you will learn in the book, he also had a trouble childhood that makes personal connection seem risky to him.

So, his fellow team members and their families have become his family. Imagine, then, the blow that comes when the six other assaulters are all mown down by machine gun fire during a raid on what was thought to be a drug organization's accounting operation. What makes it worse is that he froze at the start of the assault, or he would be dead with them. Imagine the guilt! To make matters worse, he is suspected of either being a coward or having been paid off. Life gets worse.

It becomes apparent that someone has been leaking confidential FBI information, or this slaughter could not have occurred. Who is it? Why would they want to wipe out a hostage rescue team? How was it accomplished? These are just some of the many mysteries that are brought forth. Soon, others are dying in a pattern that seem to tie back to the escape of Ernest B. Free (leader of the Free Society) from prison. Free had been the cause of the crisis that had led to the death of a little boy hostage in the assault that had cost Web London his face.

Mr. Baldacci has a strength as a story-teller in that he saves up lots of revelations for you, and deals them out frequently . . . like discount tickets to return to a theme park. This quality first becomes clear at page 99, so keep going in the beginning if you are wondering why people have liked this book. The surprises come more frequently after that. So you will want to keep turning the pages.

As the story evolves, Mr. Baldacci also provides the reader with information that the FBI doesn't have so that you can appreciate the conflict more as it develops. You will know who did what and why long before the end of the book, but the resolution of the conflict will be interesting enough that you will want to continue to the end.

The book's weakness is that the writing could have been tightened up quite a bit. There are about 200 pages of extra material in this book that should have been edited out. One of the problems of becoming a best-selling author is that you get too much power over the editors, and the amount of editing declines. With proper editing, this book could have been one of the top thrillers of all time. Without the editing, a clever concept, interesting hero, and entertaining story are allowed to clank along awkwardly for long sections where neither character nor story development occur. Mr. Baldacci, less is sometimes more . . . especially in writing!

Why do you do the work that you do? What kind of family life do you want to have? If things aren't the way you would like them in your work or family life, why aren't you changing them?

Caution: The Last Man Standing is not for the squeamish or those who have nightmares about what they read. The book has many scenes of extreme violence and mayhem aimed at good guys and bad. The book's language is also laced with virtually every common swear word that you know.

What differentiates Last Man Standing from the standard shoot-em-up thriller is that Mr. Baldacci explores the mind as much as he does the physical. Providing that context makes the book more intense, meaningful, and complex.

The book's hero, Web London, is also someone you will find interesting and admirable. At his job as a Hostage Rescue Team assaulter for the FBI, he is bold, brave, and extremely capable. But, it has come with a price. He has an unattractively reconstructed face from wounds that makes him seem like Frankenstein to some, a body covered with bullet scars, and no family life. As you will learn in the book, he also had a trouble childhood that makes personal connection seem risky to him.

So, his fellow team members and their families have become his family. Imagine, then, the blow that comes when the six other assaulters are all mown down by machine gun fire during a raid on what was thought to be a drug organization's accounting operation. What makes it worse is that he froze at the start of the assault, or he would be dead with them. Imagine the guilt! To make matters worse, he is suspected of either being a coward or having been paid off. Life gets worse.

It becomes apparent that someone has been leaking confidential FBI information, or this slaughter could not have occurred. Who is it? Why would they want to wipe out a hostage rescue team? How was it accomplished? These are just some of the many mysteries that are brought forth. Soon, others are dying in a pattern that seem to tie back to the escape of Ernest B. Free (leader of the Free Society) from prison. Free had been the cause of the crisis that had led to the death of a little boy hostage in the assault that had cost Web London his face.

Mr. Baldacci has a strength as a story-teller in that he saves up lots of revelations for you, and deals them out frequently . . . like discount tickets to return to a theme park. This quality first becomes clear at page 99, so keep going in the beginning if you are wondering why people have liked this book. The surprises come more frequently after that. So you will want to keep turning the pages.

As the story evolves, Mr. Baldacci also provides the reader with information that the FBI doesn't have so that you can appreciate the conflict more as it develops. You will know who did what and why long before the end of the book, but the resolution of the conflict will be interesting enough that you will want to continue to the end.

The book's weakness is that the writing could have been tightened up quite a bit. There are about 200 pages of extra material in this book that should have been edited out. One of the problems of becoming a best-selling author is that you get too much power over the editors, and the amount of editing declines. With proper editing, this book could have been one of the top thrillers of all time. Without the editing, a clever concept, interesting hero, and entertaining story are allowed to clank along awkwardly for long sections where neither character nor story development occur. Mr. Baldacci, less is sometimes more . . . especially in writing!

Why do you do the work that you do? What kind of family life do you want to have? If things aren't the way you would like them in your work or family life, why aren't you changing them?

Caution: The Last Man Standing is not for the squeamish or those who have nightmares about what they read. The book has many scenes of extreme violence and mayhem aimed at good guys and bad. The book's language is also laced with virtually every common swear word that you know.

What differentiates Last Man Standing from the standard shoot-em-up thriller is that Mr. Baldacci explores the mind as much as he does the physical. Providing that context makes the book more intense, meaningful, and complex.

The book's hero, Web London, is also someone you will find interesting and admirable. At his job as a Hostage Rescue Team assaulter for the FBI, he is bold, brave, and extremely capable. But, it has come with a price. He has an unattractively reconstructed face from wounds that makes him seem like Frankenstein to some, a body covered with bullet scars, and no family life. As you will learn in the book, he also had a trouble childhood that makes personal connection seem risky to him.

So, his fellow team members and their families have become his family. Imagine, then, the blow that comes when the six other assaulters are all mown down by machine gun fire during a raid on what was thought to be a drug organization's accounting operation. What makes it worse is that he froze at the start of the assault, or he would be dead with them. Imagine the guilt! To make matters worse, he is suspected of either being a coward or having been paid off. Life gets worse.

It becomes apparent that someone has been leaking confidential FBI information, or this slaughter could not have occurred. Who is it? Why would they want to wipe out a hostage rescue team? How was it accomplished? These are just some of the many mysteries that are brought forth. Soon, others are dying in a pattern that seem to tie back to the escape of Ernest B. Free (leader of the Free Society) from prison. Free had been the cause of the crisis that had led to the death of a little boy hostage in the assault that had cost Web London his face.

Mr. Baldacci has a strength as a story-teller in that he saves up lots of revelations for you, and deals them out frequently . . . like discount tickets to return to a theme park. This quality first becomes clear at page 99, so keep going in the beginning if you are wondering why people have liked this book. The surprises come more frequently after that. So you will want to keep turning the pages.

As the story evolves, Mr. Baldacci also provides the reader with information that the FBI doesn't have so that you can appreciate the conflict more as it develops. You will know who did what and why long before the end of the book, but the resolution of the conflict will be interesting enough that you will want to continue to the end.

The book's weakness is that the writing could have been tightened up quite a bit. There are about 200 pages of extra material in this book that should have been edited out. One of the problems of becoming a best-selling author is that you get too much power over the editors, and the amount of editing declines. With proper editing, this book could have been one of the top thrillers of all time. Without the editing, a clever concept, interesting hero, and entertaining story are allowed to clank along awkwardly for long sections where neither character nor story development occur. Mr. Baldacci, less is sometimes more . . . especially in writing!

Why do you do the work that you do? What kind of family life do you want to have? If things aren't the way you would like them in your work or family life, why aren't you changing them?

When I picked up the book, I was expecting a very suspenseful story and a lot of action. However, the first part of the book is spent on lengthy descriptions of characters and places and it left me disappointed. I read some other books in the meantime before I picked it up again. The second part really is more entertaining and had me smiling a couple of times. However, I found the plot very construed and was able to guess the ending after having read 2/3 of the book. What bothered me was the character of the psychiatrist, who seemed to be unable to quit analyzing for just a few seconds. I found that annoying because it made the story even less believable. Since the book is easy reading and I was able to just skim over the parts with the psychiatrist I still rate it at 2 stars.

muß man noch mehr sagen??? Ich habe schon lange nicht mehr ein 500 nochwas SEitenbuche an einem Wochenende verschlungen. Und eigentlich könnte ich es schon gleich wieder tun!