SOURCE: "The Smell of Napalm in the Morning," in New York Times Book Review, August 22, 1993, pp. 13-14.

In the following review, Liddy offers tempered criticism of Without Remorse, though concedes that "of the millions bound to read it, few will not enjoy it thoroughly."

It may seem a bit early, but why not revisit the cold war? After all, successful authors have been dining out on World War II for half a century and, if memory serves, they didn't wait long to start. The trick is to use the hottest part, Vietnam, and throw in a parallel story of revenge in the dirty world of drugs and prostitution that metastasized in our cities' streets as our involvement in Indochina progressed. In terms of the internal architecture of Without Remorse, the weaving of the two plots around the central actor in both, one John Kelly, the Navy Cross-winning former...