Dragon Mountain

by Daniel Reid

Captain Jack Robertson, a senior pilot for Air America, was in charge of Operation Burma Road when he went missing. His mission was to organize a network of agents and informants in northern Burma and Laos to help CIA monitor the activities of Burmese Communist troops, the Shan Freedom Army, the Karen Liberation Front, and other insurgent groups operating throughout the region, where they all engage in opium traffic and heroin production to finance their operations. Dragon Mountain picks up with Robertson's account of his nine-year captivity in a remote region of northern Burma. As the novel opens, the CIA are trying to confirm details of Robertson's deposition through independent fieldwork, since his abduction knocked out most of the CIA's contacts in the Golden Triangle, and only Robertson knew the key links. This gripping, action-packed, suspense novel features dark and deadly plots, abduction, and drug trafficking as it follows the incredible and courageous exploits of Captain Jack Roberston.

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1900

About the author

Daniel Reid was born in 1948 in San Francisco and spent his childhood in East Africa. After completing a Bachelor of Arts degree in East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970, and a Masters of Arts degree in Chinese Language and Civilization at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in 1973, Reid moved to Taiwan, where he spent 16 years studying and writing about various aspects of traditional Chinese culture, focusing particularly on Chinese medicine and ancient Taoist health and longevity systems. In 1989, he relocated to Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he continued his research and writing until 1999, when he immigrated with his wife Snow to the Byron Bay region of Australia, where he now makes his home.

Reviews

[Philip · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dan Reid has a long-standing and well-earned reputation as an Asia/Australia-based authority on Chinese cuisine, Taoist philosophy, qigong, Far Eastern travel and other areas of similar interest. But while he may be a reasonably decent writer, he is far less successful as an author. This book only rates a second stars because it was marginally better than his frankly offensive autobiography (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), although his main character in Dragon Mountain - I can't in good conscience call him "the protagonist" - shares the same distasteful traits Reid so proudly trumpeted in his memoir: booze, drugs and sex just cannot be overused, and women are…well, for sex. Period.

I won't go into the plot here - it's thin and dumb and not worth the effort, with the whole thing serving more as a platform for Reid to engage in endless monologuing on "America bad, Asia good;" the aforementioned benefits of endless sex/drugs/booze; and such various pseudo-Taoism hokum as astral projection, "beaming energy from the palms of one's hands," and living well into your 250s, (all stuff that I thought went out of serious consideration with the discrediting of "T. Lobsang Rampa" in the late 1950s). I also have to note that the bad guy is such an over-the-top "evil Chinaman" that I could only picture him as Christopher Walken in "Balls of Fury," rather than someone along the lines of Han in Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon," (as I imagine Reid intended); and so far more this:



…than this:



So why did I ever bother reading this? Fair question. I always enjoy reading books by or about people I know, or know-ish, and as Reid and I overlapped for a number of years in Taiwan, we eventually became…I guess I'd say "aware of each other" within the relatively small expat community at that time. And so in spite of his deeply off-putting memoir, when I heard from a common friend that he had also written a novel, I thought hey, that might be a fun read if I ever ran across it, (although I also assumed that was unlikely, as it is unavailable on Amazon, and the only copy currently on eBay is going for $384!).

However…last weekend I attended the excellent Green Valley Book Fair in central Virginia, and to my surprise found a copy there for just $1 - and how could I pass up a savings of $383?? And so there ya go; got it, read it quick (its one redeeming feature being its brevity), and can now add it to my "I read it so you don't have to" list.

ALL THAT SAID…if you are at all into the OTHER side of Reid - herbal medicine, Chinese healing, the art of tea drinking, meditation & martial arts, Chinese cooking, etc. - then by all means have at it. Just maybe avoid his journeys into fiction and deeply misogynistic self-aggrandizement.

[Paul Vittay · Rating 4 out of 5]

P

[Andrei · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book captures some aspects of the opium trade in the golden triangle around 1970s.