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Barry Eisler, after graduating from Cornell Law School in 1989, Barry Eisler spent three years with the U.S. government. For a decade thereafter he practiced various aspects of international law, including a year with the Japanese law firm of Hamada & Matsumoto in Tokyo and two years as in-house counsel at the Osaka headquarters of Matsushita Electric & Industrial Co., Ltd. Mr. Eisler earned his black belt in judo from the Kodokan International Judo Center in Tokyo. Today he lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area and continues to travel to Japan frequently. Rights to Rain Fall, his first novel, have been sold in ten countries, and film rights have been purchased by Jet Li. HARD RAIN is his second novel.
HARD RAIN
Eisler's second John Rain novel, more than fulfills the promise of the first. Rain-half-Japanese, half-American, raised in both countries but at home in neither-is trying to leave his life as a freelance assassin. After killing a CIA officer who hunted him halfway around the globe, Rain goes underground, hoping to find the peace that has eluded him. But then Tatsu, his old nemesis from the Japanese FBI, comes to him with one last job: to find and eliminate a killer at large, a creature with neither compassion nor compunction, whose activities could tip the balance of power in Japan's corrupt politics and who seems to have designs on Rain's few friends. To protect them, Rain will have to pursue his most dangerous quarry yet through the crosshairs of the CIA and the Japanese mafia, where the differences between friend and foe and truth and deceit are as murky as the rain-slicked streets of Tokyo.
Barry Eisler's Summer Reading List
Portrait in Sepia
by Isabel Allende
The sequel to Daughter of Fortune. I loved the first book for its characters: larger than life, but always three dimensional, sympathetic, totally believable. And Allende’s evocation of place – in this case mid-nineteenth-century Chile and California – is as rich as her characters. Eliza Sommers is a beautiful, compelling protagonist, and I can’t wait to revisit her world.
Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History – The Arming of the Mujahideen
by George Crile
I read a review of this one in the Economist, which has never steered me wrong before (the magazine introduced me to Motherless Brooklyn, for example), and it sounds great. The book reveals how America armed the mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan: the role of Congress, the CIA, Pakistan, and other players. I’m always interested in the real dirt on how ostensibly high-minded decisions are made (this may be why I like Ellroy so much): who makes the pitch, who benefits, who pays. This book sounds like it’s got all of that and more.
The Big Nowhere
by James Ellroy
The second book of his L.A. Quartet. Nobody writes like Ellroy. Nobody can. Nobody should even try. (Couldn’t help giving it a whirl there, though.)
Why Ellroy? The characters, the setting, the cool. The preface to American Tabloid alone is worth the price of admission. For example: "…The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He talked a slick line and wore a world class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab."Jack got whacked at the optimum moment to ensure his sainthood. Lies continue to swirl around his eternal flame. It’s time to dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall…"
Also can’t wait for the final installment of the trilogy that begins with American Tabloid and continues with The Cold Six Thousand.
20:21 Vision: Twentieth-Century Lessons for the Twenty-First Century
by Bill Emmott
This one I’ve already started and so far it’s great. Like the Economist, the peerless magazine that he edits, Emmott’s analysis of international trends is clear-sighted, calm, and profound. I’m reading Emmott’s book both out of natural curiosity about the meaning of events and because an understanding of these events helps me create the background for the stories I write. If you want to understand where the world is going – China, Europe, Japan, terrorism – you have to read Emmott (and his magazine, too).
The Crossing
by Cormac McCarthy
The second book of his Border Trilogy. McCarthy is a master at conjuring up primal images out of the collective unconscious. I’m still speechless every time I read this passage from Blood Meridian:
"They wandered the borderland for weeks seeking some sign of the Apache. Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all."
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