I’d been catching some buzz about “The Hunger Games,” with some people saying it would be the next big movie series, a successor to “Harry Potter” and “Twilight.” In fact, “Hunger Games” is now in development as a movie.

I found a copy at Sam’s Club in the Young Adult section, surrounded by the “Twilight” books and other novels  featuring vampires, werewolves, and post-apocalyptic themes.

“The Hunger Games” is in the post-apocalyptic camp. From what I could piece together, the United States is pretty much gone, except for 13 small cities scattered around a country now called Panem. Twelve of those cities are under the domination of The Capitol, a ruthless high-tech city in what used to be Colorado. The authoritarian Capitol keeps the other cities poor and subservient.

Every year (this is the 74th year), two teenagers are chosen by lot from each town. The 24 teens are then taken to the Capitol, where they compete to the death in the Hunger Games, a gladiatorial fight to the death. The winner is rewarded with lifetime perks. Everything is televised throughout the 13 cities.

The protagonist is Katniss Everdeen, a 15-year-old girl living in a mining town somewhere in the Appalachians (each town has some kind of specialty). When her little sister, Prim, is selected to represent her city in the Hunger Games, Katniss offers to take her place. Joining her is Peeta, a boy who has had a crush on Katniss for years, though she’s oblivious to that.

Katniss and Peeta are whisked off to The Capitol, where they go through a period of training. Then the game begins. I’m not going to say anything more, lest I give away something. But I’ll say this: I really enjoyed it. While the plot sounds like “The Running Man” and other movies, “The Hunger Games” plows a fresh field.

Being a young adult book, “The Hunger Games” is clean of sexual content and obscenity. That was nice.

All three books in the trilogy are in print, but only the first book is in paperback. As soon as the others reach paperback, I’ll buy them, because I really want to know what happens next. Suzanne Collins, the author, created future that I’m eager to learn more about. We only catch some hints, dropped sparingly. Somehow, the Capitol needs to be overthrown. That doesn’t happen in “The Hunger Games,” so I anxiously await the next two books.

Donald Westlake wrote nearly 30 books under the name Richard Stark between 1963 and his death in 2009. Stark was Westlake’s dark persona. Most of those books starred a hardcore professional thief named Parker. Westlake wrote 16 Parker books 1963-1974, then took a lengthy break before writing “Comeback” in 1997, and following it with another 7 Parker books.

A number of those books have been made into movies, but none use the name Parker.

The first book, “The Hunter,” has been made into a movie twice. The first version, 1967’s “Point Blank,” starred Lee Marvin as Parker, though in the movie he was named Walker; he was joined by Angie Dickinson.

The second version, from 1999, is the excellent “Payback,” starring Mel Gibson as Porter, which is the Parker character. I love that movie. It’s tight, moves right along, has crisp dialogue, sets a definite noir mood, and follows a great plot. Mel Gibson’s Porter nails the Parker character. He’s joined by James Coburn, Lucy Liu, Maria Bello, Kris Kristofferson, and William Devane, among others.

“Payback” is based on the first Richard Stark novel, “The Hunter.” The book’s plot is far simpler than the movie’s. Parker is double-crossed and left for dead after a heist, and spends the rest of the book tracking down his former partner, Mal, and getting even. Mal has bought his way back into the good graces of “The Outfit,” a mob organization, which Parker must contend with.

Parker is ruthless, unconcerned with human life, uncaring about much of anything except himself. This comes through glaringly in one scene which didn’t appear in the movie. To stake-out a building, Parker invades a small store across the street and ties and gags the owner while he’s borrowing her location. But she’s asthmatic, and accidentally dies on him. He thinks nothing of it. Didn’t intend to kill her, but it happened. Oh well. This minor scene stuck with me more than any other scene in the book.

A number of scenes in “Payback” are right out of the book. However, the movie takes the plot much further and brings in additional characters, making it a richer story. This is one case where the movie is better than the book. But the book does what it needs to do. Interestingly, although the name Parker is changed to Porter, all of the characters in the movie use the same name as in the book–Mal Resnick, Stegman, Carter, Fairfax, Bronson.

I liked “The Hunter,” so thought I’d try the second book in the series, “The Man with the Getaway Face.” Having upset The Outfit, Parker buys a face-change. He then gets involved in an armored car heist. When the plastic surgeon is killed, he becomes involved in finding the killer, though only to keep his new identity secret from The Outfit.

The Parker of “The Man with the Getaway Face” seemed toned down a bit, not quite as ruthless, though there is little room for sympathy. He’s just a flat-out hard case. And I’m becoming a fan.

“The Grifters” is a 1963 book by Jim Thompson (published by Vintage/Black Lizard in 1990). It focuses on smalltime con-artist Roy Dillon, along with his girlfriend Myra Langtry and mother, Lilly Dillon, who are also con artists. There are no “good guys.” Everyone’s a crook.

The book has no plot, per se. We’re just dropped into their lives and watch things happen to them. You know events will lead up to a climax of some kind, but don’t really know what it’ll look like. Except that, this being Jim Thompson, there will probably be some dead bodies.

I’m not criticizing the book. It’s a very good book, without the psychotic people who normally populate Jim Thompson books. I really enjoyed it. It’s less than 200 pages and took me about three days.

In 1990 the book was made into a Stephen Frears movie starring John Cusack (one of my favorite actors), Annette Benning, and Angelica Huston. It as a good movie, a character study as much as anything. Donald Westlake, employing his darker Richard Stark persona, wrote the screenplay. I can’t remember the movie well enough to tell you whether or not it faithfully followed the book. But I recommend both the book and movie.

I’ve been reading quite a few books about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Most have been very good, and they’ve all been quite different.

“War,” by Sebastian Junger, is my favorite. Junger is best-known for his 1997 book “The Perfect Storm,” a phenomenal work which became an international bestseller. But he has proven himself as a war reporter in such places as Bosnia, Liberia, Cyprus, Kashmir, and now Afghanistan.

Junger is an amazing writer. When I saw that he had written a book on Afghanistan, I knew I had to read it. Likewise for Jon Krakauer, another master wordsmith, who wrote “Where Men Win Glory” (which I reviewed previously). I was blown away by the poetry of “The Perfect Storm.” While the writing of “War” is much different, it’s still brilliant.

For over a year, Junger and a photojournalist embedded with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in the remote Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan, right along the Pakistani border (a bit north of Tora Bora and the famed Kyber Pass). They especially focused on Restrepo, a small outpost, which found itself in firefights on a regular basis.

The amount of combat experienced at Restrepo and the surrounding outposts is astounding, a real eye-opener. For a while, the firefights occur practically every day. American soldiers die and are wounded frequently. Junger notes, “Most Korengalis have never left their village, and have almost no understanding of the world beyond the mouth of the valley. That makes it a perfect place in which to base an insurgency dedicated to fighting outsiders.”

The title, “War,” is interesting, as if it’s a book about war in general, rather than about a specific combat team in a specific place. But Junger does use Restrepo to generalize about warfare. He uses the experiences of soldiers in the Korengal Valley to draw analogies with previous wars and to cite various studies. We get
to know the American soldiers very well, and we get engrossed in the
life they lead in the Korengal. But through them, we learn what
soldiers in all wars, especially modern wars, experience.

In one fascinating section, he explains what happens physiologically to men during combat–pupils dilating, pulse and blood pressure approaching heart-attack levels, blood flooding the heart, brain, and major muscle groups. A high heart-rate makes it difficult to aim a rifle. At 170 beats per minute, tunnel vision and loss of depth perception occur. It’s fascinating stuff.

 The best way to tell you about this book is to use Sebastian Junger’s words.

“To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake and all the wrong people in power.”

“War is a lot of things, and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting….Soldiers discuss that fact with each other and eventually with their chaplains and their shrinks and maybe even their spouses, but the public will never hear about it. It’s just not something that many people want acknowledged. War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways 20 minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else.”

“Pretty much everyone who died in this valley died when they least expected it, usually shot in the head or throat, so it could make the men weird about the most mundane tasks….The men just never knew, which meant that anything they did was potentially the last thing they’d ever do.”

One soldier told him, “There are guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other. But they would also die for each other.”

Junger (right) says he never heard the soldiers question the validity of the war. That was a luxury for persons at the main bases, behind the lines.

He talks about “the insane amount of firepower” available to the Americans, like the big shoulder-fired Javelin rocket “that can be steered into the window of a speeding car half a mile away. Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.”

“Combat was a game that the United States had asked Second Platoon to become very good at, and once they had, the United States had put them on a hilltop without women, hot food, running water, communication with the outside world, or any kind of entertainment for over a year. Not that the men were complaining, but that sort of thing has consequences. Society can give its young men almost any job and they’ll figure out how to do it. They’ll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it WILL get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for.”

“Heroism is hard to study in soldiers because they invariably claim that they acted like any good soldier would have. Among other things, heroism is a negation of the self–you’re prepared to lose your own life for the sake of others–so in that sense, talking about how brave you were may be psychologically contradictory. (Try telling a mother she was brave to run into traffic to save her kid.) Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered ‘bravery.’ Soldiers see it the other way around: either you’re doing your duty or you’re a coward.”

He talks about how soldiers hold each other accountable, because sloppiness doesn’t just endanger them, it endangers everybody. “Once I watched a private accost another private whose bootlaces were trailing on the ground. Not that he cared what it looked like, but if something happened suddenly–and out there, everything happened suddenly–the guy with the loose laces couldn’t be counted on to keep his feet at a crucial moment. It was the OTHER man’s life he was risking, not just his own.”

“Humans may be the only animal that practices what could be thought of as ‘suicidal defense’: an individual male will rush to the defense of another male despite the fact that both are likely to die.”

“When men say they miss combat, it’s not that they actually miss getting shot at–you’d have to be deranged–but that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.”

If you’re going to read a book about the Afghan-Iraq wars, there are several I recommend highly. But this one tops my list.