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Editorial Review:
As grippingly as any novelist, preeminent World War II historian Stephen Ambrose uses Band of Brothers to tell the horrifying, hallucinatory saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members he calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth circa 1941-45. Ambrose takes us along on Easy Company's trip from gruelling basic training to Utah Beach on D-day, where a dozen of them turned German cannons into dynamited ruins resembling "half-peeled bananas", on to the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of part of the Dachau concentration camp, and a large party at Hitler's "Eagle's Nest", where they drank the his (surprisingly inferior) champagne. Of Ambrose's main sources, three soldiers became rich civilians; at least eight became teachers; one became Albert Speer's jailer; one prosecuted Robert Kennedy's assassin; another became a mountain recluse; the despised, sadistic CO who first trained Easy Company (and to whose strictness many soldiers attributed their survival of the war) wound up a suicidal loner whose own sons skipped his funeral. The Easy Company survivors describe the hell and confusion of any war: the senseless death of the nicest kid in the company when a souvenir Luger goes off in his pocket; the execution of a GI by his CO for disobeying an order not to get drunk. Despite the gratuitous horrors it relates, Band of Brothers illustrates what one of Ambrose's sources calls "the secret attractions of war ... the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction ... war as spectacle". --Tim Appelo
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Stick to the TV series................... I came to this after watching (and re-watching) the TV series. As military history is a favourite subject of mine I thought I'd give the book on which the series is based a go, and? Well, I wish I hadn't bothered. Firstly the book is written by an American, and is written, very much, from the American standpoint - need not have been a problem but as Ambrose would have it, the 'Band of Brothers' won the war single handedly and despite the assistance of the British (characterised, when they are very... more info
Dull - a wasted opportunity......... Hugely disappointed after seeing the fantastic HBO series on TV. It whetted my appetite and I was approaching this book in a postive frame of mind. Ambrose's work is barely saved by the fascinating subject matter, failing to pull together anything remotely readable. Throughout the book the reader remains on the outside, the author makes no attempt to engage his audience. We are left with a bare shell of a book, with a painfully weak narrative. There is no sense of connection with the men of Easy... more info
Good accounts peppered with problems Stephen Ambrose presents an account of an American paratrooper company in the Second World War. Solely focusing on Easy from beginning to end allows you to really get to know individual members how they lived and as another reviewer said gives you a real insight of stepping out into battle from beginning to end. My first criticism of the book would be the contribution; it seems those who contributed get put forward in a hero like manner with others who sadly could not contribute sometimes getting... more info
Interesting A good read after watching the HBO series, I would recommend "Beyond Band of Brothers" by Maj Dick Winters, Covers some areas not included in the film or the Book by Ambrose.
