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Title: The Marine: A Novel of War From Guadalcanal to Korea by James Brady ISBN: 0-312-29142-6 Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books Pub. Date: 03 June, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.83 (6 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: A terrific read.
Comment: Brady's latest work, The Marine, is a spectacular novel. I fully enjoyed reading it the entire time. It begins as the main charachter, Lt. Col. James T. Cromwell, is heading for college at Notre Dame, and follows him through his days as a boxer, and then as a raider and as a regular marine. His charachter inspired me and fueled my interest in the Marines with his life like bravery and fearlessness. While the main charachter is quite unorthodox, Cromwell is exactly what the marines want in their men. This is a must read for any war novel buff.

Rating: 3
Summary: "Smoke if you got 'em . . . "
Comment: A central issue to the novelist's tools is that you like the main character. This is nearly a responsibility more than just a style. In fiction, certainly the tale can be told with a main character you wouldn't want go on vacation with. But generally, you should feel some passion about him/her and about the struggles they endeavor to resolve. Not so with Lieutenant Colonel Cromwell.

I have enjoyed many of the Jim Brady books. I thoroughly liked the wry humor and courage and depth and loyalty of Billy Port in "Warning of War," and read the final 25 pages of "The Marines of Autumn" with a lump in my throat recognizing the pain and suffering of Tom Verity and his Marine translators during the breakout from Chosin Reservoir.

I couldn't replicate those feelings for Jim Cromwell. Here was a man about whom an epic could have been written. If there were novels about men at war that we wanted shorther, here was one we clearly wanted stretched. It had all the earmarks of an epic: New York to South Bend to Berlin to Camp Pendleton to Makin to Tarawa to Iwo, then to South Korea.

But instead, Colonel Cromwell is shallow, almost superficial. He has the feelings, he just can't express them. We're not expecting 'it was a dark and stormy night,' but in 20 years he has 3 contacts with women that last less than 2 pages, and his most insightful dialogue about the meaning of what Orwell's 'the hard men' do, is with Gunnery Sergeant Arzt, who, like Cromwell's eventual injuries, dies offstage somewhere with litle pomp nor circumstance.

Overall, it had great potential and I can't help but think it could have been longer and more substantial, instead of leaner and more sparse.

I'll still read Jim Brady; this one fell short of his own standards.

Rating: 1
Summary: I've seen better...
Comment: James Brady knows more than I ever possibly could about being a Marine and fighting a war. I read Brady's Parade column every week, I know he served in Korea as a rifle company commander and he would know best what life was like in the Korean War, but this book is just awful. Imagine several hundred pages of the same choppy newspaper style writing he uses in his columns. Add to this a soulless main character, a tiresome running joke about meeting Hitler and no suspense or drama in the story and you have a disastrous book.

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