Operation Anadyr

Timeline 10/27/62, Book 1

By: James Philip

Narrated by: Kelly Rhodes

Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

The Cuban Missiles Crisis didn't end peacefully and the '"swinging sixties" didn't happen. On Saturday, October 27, 1962, American and Soviet geopolitical brinkmanship resulted in the most terrible war in human history. The forever changed world that remained when the thermonuclear fires had burned themselves out is the world of Timeline 10/27/62.

Operation Anadyr is Book One of the alternative history series, Timeline 10/27/62.

Operation Anadyr is about the first hours of that alternative history of the world. It is about living through the cataclysm, and wondering how it happened. How did the unthinkable happen? How could our leaders let it happen? How does one quantify the magnitude of the disaster? And what of the survivors living with the aftermath of a world gone mad? Operation Anadyr confronts these questions. In Operation Anadyr, the anatomy of the disaster is writ plain and the men and women who survive it begin to find their voices.

Why Timeline 10/27/62? Because that date is a very significant date in my life and in the lives of everybody else in the world alive today because on Saturday, October 27, 1962, World War III almost started. World War III probably wouldn't have lasted very long, because one side would have been swiftly obliterated in the first 24 hours of a cataclysm that would have left vast tracts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabited and uninhabitable for decades to come. Perhaps, a quarter of the world's population would have died in the firestorm or in the starvation and the plagues that would have ensued in the following weeks and months.

©2014 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip (P)2016 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip

Truly painful to hear

The reader is not a native English speaker. The words are clear, but the cadence and inflection are badly off. It sounds like it is being read by a 1980’s text-to-speech program. The “story” includes long passages of dry recitation of facts.

Disappointing

The premise was good but the execution failed. For a profound event like nuclear war, there needs to be something more than a few flickers on the horizon and a very detailed description of how high the smoke would rise. There was no buildup of suspense, nothing to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Too many unnecessary descriptions of the history of the ships involved interspersed with very dry readings of future encyclopedia entries turned what should have been an exciting narrative into a cure for insomnia.

The narrator was not the best though I think with practice he might be. He did seem to do better as the story progressed.

Character development was poor. There was background information on the characters but not enough depth on how they felt. It was almost as if they heard about the war and went "meh".

I won't be reading subsequent books. There just wasn't any excitement to the story.