Karen Rhodes who wrote a book ("the" book) on H50 which was published in 1997 (and reprinted more than once after this), emailed me about the above review, she says I can repost her thoughts (below):

Good grief, what an execrable review -- filled with excrement. Take a look in Booking Hawaii Five-0 at what I said about the charge that the series or McGarrett was "fascist" on page 12. These two authors are just regurgitating sixties rhetoric, which usually had to adhere to a prescribed ideology, marked by a total resistance to and knee-jerk crticism of authority without any rational argument behind it. Sure, we should question authority. But question it rationally, not create a critique out of whole cloth which sounds the alarm that the sky is falling. Radicals on either side of the spectrum tend to be pretty hidebound and close-minded. The authors speak as though they had never watched an episode of the series beyond the pilot, "Cocoon." See page 3 of Booking Hawaii Five-0 for how I feel about critics who extrapolate from one exposure to a series and base their entire critique on that one exposure. (Oh, I always do love to have a chance to plug the book! LOL!) Sounds like they read other critical reviews of these three series rather than actually watching them. I do have to concede, though, that in the case of "The FBI," the producers were most likely constrained terribly by ol' J. Edgar, as concerned as he was about his image. And his power. He was in office WAY too long. Little anecdote: I came across a statement by someone who did not cite a source for it that after Prohibition, Eliot Ness applied for the FBI, and in response, J. Edgar wrote across Ness's application, "Not him!" Probably afraid Ness would have had his job as director. He probably would have.

Max Allan Collins has a bias; he has written several novels with Eliot Ness as the protagonist, and more recently wrote a book about Ness and Capone. I happen to be batty about Robert Stack, who played Eliot Ness in "The Untouchables" (1959-1963). But I can speak at length about the virtues and vices of the series as a television series. These two authors lack any objectivity about any of the three you cited. I think it pretty funny that they lambasted Five-0 and McGarrett as "fascist" and the other descriptors they used, yet rated The Untouchables among their top police procedurals. Other critics skewered Robert Stack as playing Ness pretty much a "fascist," law-and-order-uber-alles, stone-faced plank of wood, much the way these two skewer Jack Lord's portrayal of McGarrett -- about which they are dead wrong, just as prior critics were wrong about Robert Stack's Ness.