While light in tone and stylistically breezy, he marbles it with anger at America’s inability to lower the temperature surrounding the Second Amendment ... Mr. Israel, who writes with verve and curdled humor (think Carl Hiaasen), is nothing if not disrespectful, depicting a president named Piper as spineless and Speaker of the House Frank Piermont as, shall we say, transactional ... May Steve Israel’s biting, amusing satire chip away at the evil and hypocrisy that inflame and stymie the gun control conversation.
'A Modest Proposal' it’s not, but Big Guns and its rollicking carousel of political skulduggery provide plenty of opportunities for Israel to score points off the foibles of our political system — an admittedly broad and eminently hittable target ... Humor is notoriously subjective, but Beltway wit has always seemed to me curiously adolescent, long on corn and innuendo, short on sophistication. Big Guns is no exception ... If this is your kind of thing, you’re probably going to need an oxygen tank at some point; more refined readers may find themselves groaning. Israel’s writing in general is more energetic than skillful — his first novel was written 'in cars, planes, and the occasional boring meeting,' he says — but no one is likely to pick up Big Guns in search of shimmering literary prose. As it is, he is surprisingly deft at constructing a twisty plot capable of keeping the reader flipping the pages — a harder task than it seems ... The denouement is cleverly engineered but emotionally empty, and the book’s moral standpoint can be reduced to a shrug.
...[a] brilliant politcal satire ... He takes the same kind of snarky, tasty bite out of eastern Long Island’s overdevelopment that Carl Hiaasen does from the plunder of Florida ... Promise readers that the only way they will put this book down is when Charlton Heston’s ghost pries it from their cold dead hands.
