book review, Volume 1, number 2, February 1999 Fish & Game Superheroes He was mad, or so they said...but others thought only "disturbed." Well, guess what? This wasn’t a prize-winning sentence from the Bulwer-Lytton Contest (See the book, It was a dark and stormy night, the Best (?) from the Bulwer-Lytton Contest: The funniest opening sentences from the worst novels never written). No, this is the opening sentence of Ken Goddard’s book, Double Blind. The Tampa Tribune and Times calls it an "intense environmental thriller." I can agree on the thriller part. How about this sentence, on page 230: It took the Ranger hunter-killer recon team almost an hour to camouflage themselves appropriately and work their way along the low, tree-filled ridge overlooking the designated site. If you think these sentences are funny, then this is the right book for you. It has 460 pages and they are all funny. I was never able to tell if the author deliberately wrote a spoof or if he is really that bad a writer. Ken Goddard, currently the director of the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, writes like his job title sounds. His book bursts with sentences of the same caliber. He creates special agent operations teams working for the federal Fish and Wildlife agency, whose members are amazing characters. I especially like Thomas Woeshack, an Eskimo from Soldotna (traditional Eskimo country?), the Special Agent/Pilot of the Bravo Team, who is afraid of flying and who forgot his ammunition one time when he went out to hunt polar bears. You read that one right. I personally think it’s rather frightening that there are polar bears around Soldotna and nobody cared to warn me.
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