Cowboy Mafia book review

Cowboy Mafia first published in 2000 isn't very good read though it could have been and if re-written it could still be.

The Author, Roy Graham obviously self-published it since there is no publishing company listed anywhere inside or out. The cover art was copyrighted by JR Graham so I'm going out on a wing here and say that's a Roy Graham pseudonym.

I'm doing research on the drug smuggling industry as it relates to Corrosion Corner so I got the book through Amazon (Barnes & Noble online offers it too). I read its forward and it sounded like a good amount of information could be gleaned from the pages. There is a story here but it is very poorly presented.

I went back to Amazon's site and read the 35 reviews to see if anyone had the same reaction I did. To my surprise I found 17 of them to be five stars. When I read those reviews I saw a pattern develop and I recalled the old marketing technique from the past about writing you own reviews and back cover endorsements under various pseudonyms. Sorry to say, in this case the ploy was very obvious.

Upon looking at the one, two & three star ratings I could see my evaluation had hit the mark. Most were very eloquent in there encouragement of the author but pointed out the many flaws they found. However, more than a few were very direct. Review titles include "Can You Say Run-on Sentence?", "Great Story-Horrible Writing!", "Incredibly Idiotic", "Lost in Space" and "needed a proof reader".

My own comments would echo those and as I said above, it still could be a good story. Authors are often a fickle lot who don't take critique well. Pilots, who often have big egos are the same. Most of us are Type-A personalities. But I even question some of Roy's qualifications though I am sure he is a pilot.

In his personal assessment of his own background as a pilot he made a glaring error in the first three pages of the book by calling a T-41 a jet. It isn't. It's a Cessna 172 (145 HP version) and it was often used by civilian instructors to give U.S. Air Force pilots their initial flight training. However, the aircraft he describes is a T-37 and I'd have to research further but I don't think civilian instructors taught in the U. S. Air Force's T-37s.

I personally don't like his depiction of these guys as having some sort of moral code. He comes very close to idolizing them and almost painting them as victims.

Finally, the font for the typesetting appears to be a basic word pad or basic word processor font. There are no changes throughout the book except the foreword. It was obviously written using a different word processing program. Parts of the foreword were used many times in the "positive" reviews I saw on Amazon.

I'll do a bit more reading and see if there are jewels-in-the-rough here but I wouldn't recommend it as a good read.