Brilliantly written story which explores some very scary concepts with regards to brain washing. I was led here by Dean Koontz's Whispering Room, which also has the same scary brain washing concepts.

Considering how long ago this was published, by just changing the war and the enemies, the story can still take place today.

And just the way the good guys find out about the brain washing...quite funny. For people expecting spoilers...well, they can go and jump in a lake :) ( )

4/25/22

You've probably heard about the movie, but not the book, but please read the book, and don't see the movie. If you are going to see the movie, see the original with Frank Sinatra.

This book blew me away because never had I read a book so full of characters I despised. One character is so disrespected by the author that he does not even give her a name and she is a main character in the book. This book touches on many mores and I understand why it has study guides. It is a brilliant and thought and provoking book, but keep in mind that it is a work of fiction. ( )

Condon's The Manchurian Candidate is sometimes apt: "Iselin is a man who shall forever stand guard at the door of the mind to protect the people of this great nation from facts.” It is often weighty, filled with handfuls of mot recherché and esoteric allusions: "He felt the sadness of Lucifer." It is sometimes flippant: "Their brains had not merely been washed, they had been dry-cleaned." But, it is always compelling.
Raymond Shaw has been taken to Manchuria, along with all the other members of his captive platoon, by Chinese and Russian agents who succeed using Pavlovian response theory to so deeply hypnotize him that they can control him for years to come as an assassin spreading chaos through the West. The other members of his unit are hypnotized into believing that Shaw performed actions so heroic that they were deserving of the Medal of Honor which will give Shaw tremendous influence. Yen Lo, the genius who has developed the brain washing technique has Shaw murder coldly two of his mates, Mavole and Lembeck by way of demonstration. Lieutenant Ben Marco who has been brainwashed sufficiently to submit the imaginary heroic action for consideration a few months after the captives are returned to the battleground has absorbed the hypnosis consciously but is haunted by his subconscious through constant nightmares of the brutal murders of Mavole and Lembeck.
The moving force of this novel is Raymond Shaw's mother, a malevolent, incestuous, drug addicted, megalomaniacal, manipulative force behind Raymond, and her husband Johnny Iselin whom she scheming to advance to the U.S. Presidency.

The Manchurian Candidate tells a completely implausible story - or does it?

Following his capture by Soviet troops during the Korean War, a U.S. soldier named Raymond Shaw is brainwashed and turned into the perfect killing machine. Ultimately, his mission -- eight years in the future -- is to assassinate a leading American political figure (using a Soviet sniper rifle). This would put the candidate favoured by the Soviets and Communist Chinese into the White House.

Within four years of its publication, the book was seen as prescient following the assassination -- by sniper -- of President John F. Kennedy. That assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had lived for some time in Soviet Russia, though no one alleged that he had been brainwashed into carrying out the attack.

More than a half century later, some saw parallels to The Manchurian Candidate in the allegations of post-Soviet Russian interference in another U.S. presidential election.

But even without those examples, the book's completely bonkers idea that a person could be programmed to become an assassin is less crazy than it might appear. Early in the book, one of the leading characters, a Chinese scientist who is demonstrating to his Soviet and Chinese superiors the success of his method, cites a number of articles and books that back up his theory. And the truly strange thing is this: all the books and articles he cites are real, and we can read them today.

Interestingly, during the Second World War there were some suggestions that this could be done, and that at least one high-profile Nazi held in Britain might be "hypnotised" into returning to Germany and assassinating Himmler. But it was never tried.

The author, Richard Condon, was probably not suggesting that one could (or should) turn people like Raymond Shaw into robotic killing machines. His book is more of a satire of the Cold War and American politics of the McCarthy era (with Shaw's step-father cast as the McCarthy figure).

But it does make one think. ( )