I’ve known Sam Walker since he was only a few years old. His father, Jack Walker, was a colleague of my dad’s in the University of Michigan’s political science department, and they were best friends. They had season tickets together at the Big House for close to twenty years, and I sat with Jack on many occasions — the last being a drive down to Lexington, Kentucky for the SouthEast regional game in Michigan’s run to the 1989 NCAA basketball championship, with my dad and his then girlfriend Susan McClanahan. Jack died an untimely death at 55, blindsided by a drunk driver who ran a stop sign. Sam’s mother, Linda, is a writer and novelist, who was friends with my mom for many years too. After Cheryl and I were married in 1989, we were close with Linda, too; Linda and I had always shared a love for the written word, and she has a terrific sense of humor that resonated well with Cheryl’s.

FANTASYLAND reflects the best of Sam’s heritage. It combines sports mania, a passion for quantitative methods (something Michigan’s political science department is known for), a strong narrative drive, and many laugh-out-loud funny moments. This is a terrific book.

Interview with Chalmers Johnson: Cold Warrior in a Strange Land

As he and his wife Sheila drive me through downtown San Diego in the glare of mid-day, he suddenly exclaims, “Look at that structure!” I glance over and just across the blue expanse of the harbor is an enormous aircraft carrier. “It’s the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan,” he says, “the newest carrier in the fleet. It’s a floating Chernobyl and it sits a proverbial six inches off the bottom with two huge atomic reactors. You make a wrong move and there goes the country’s seventh largest city.”

Soon, we’re heading toward their home just up the coast in one of those fabled highway traffic jams that every description of Southern California must include. “We feel we’re far enough north,” he adds in the kind of amused tone that makes his company both alarming and thoroughly entertaining, “so we could see the glow, get the cat, pack up, and head for Quartzsite, Arizona.”

Chalmers Johnson, who served in the U.S. Navy and now is a historian of American militarism, lives cheek by jowl with his former service. San Diego is the headquarters of the 11th Naval District. “It’s wall to wall military bases right up the coast,” he comments. “By the way, this summer the Pentagon’s planning the largest naval concentration in the Pacific in the post-World War II period! Four aircraft-carrier task forces — two from the Atlantic and that’s almost unprecedented — doing military exercises off the coast of China.”

Some troubling misstatements in the first few paragraphs here. First, Navy nuclear reactors have an incredible safety record. Second, the Navy has operated five or more carriers at the same time in both the Persian Gulf and the Viet Nam war.