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Title: Sword Point by Harold Coyle ISBN: 0-671-73712-0 Publisher: Pocket Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1990 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.93 (14 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A competent start to a consistently improving series.
Comment: I plowed through Harold Coyle's Dixon series in haphazard disorder. Reading this first installment, I couldn't help but feel that he was still honing his skills in epic storytelling. He focuses narrowly on a rather simplistic scenario, while peopling his story with a huge number of shapeless characters, among whom the principal participants would become more familiar with each successive sequel. Many of his secondary characters start out promisingly only to be neglected and eventually forgotten. Compounding problems is a jumpy narrative that leaves gaps where more detailed exposition would have been better. Sometimes an intriguing thread is started and developed slightly, gaining the reader's interest, only for the story to jump forward several days without resolving preceeding events satisfactorily.
Still, Sword Point is a worthy read, if only for the great combat scenes (an area in which Coyle clearly excels!), not to mention a peek into the origins of people like Dixon, Vorishnov and Ilvanich.
Rating: 4
Summary: Cold War heats up in Iranian desert.....
Comment: Following the success of Team Yankee, a depiction of World War III as seen from company level, Harold Coyle achieved acclaim with Sword Point, a novel pitting the United States and the Soviet Union in armed conflict in Iran.
Set in the late 1980s, Sword Point begins with the peacetime routine of an American Army unit in the middle of a training exercise at Ft. Campbell, Ky. In a scene that mixes Coyle's fine eye for detail and wry humorous touches, Staff Sergeant Donald Duncan's infantry platoon carefully sets up an ambush against an OPFOR (opposing force):
"The ensuing firefight would short but bloodless. The men of both Duncan's platoon and the OPFOR....were using MILES, short for "multiple integrated laser engagement system." Each weapon was tipped with a rectangular gray box which emitted a laser beam every time the weapon was fired. Every man....had laser detectors on his helmet and web gear that would detect the laser from another weapon. When this happened, a buzzer, also attached to each man's gear, would go off, telling him and his buddies that he was 'dead.' The use of MILES ensured that there would be no doubt who won and who lost, a far cry from the days when most training exercises degenerated into screaming matches of 'I shot you' and 'No you didn't.' "
But as Duncan and his men "struggle" through their training exercise, halfway around the world a Soviet armored column rumbles toward the Iranian border in the predawn darkness. The Soviet leadership has decided to invade -- Coyle never really tells us why -- Iran, planning to conquer the country and reach the Straits of Hormuz in four weeks' time. Some of the junior Red Army officers are apprehensive -- the Afghan War has taught the Soviets much about the costs of fighting against desperate Muslims -- but Moscow and the Soviet General Staff don't believe there will be much opposition from Iran...or the West.
But as soon as the Soviets launch their invasion, America mobilizes, and soon U.S. forces head to the Persian Gulf. Within weeks, the news are full of images of combat between the two superpowers as battles are fought on air, land and sea.
But the Soviets are not the only enemy the American forces face in Iran. The ayatollahs still rule the Islamic Iranian Republic, and while they fight fiercely against the Russians, the Iranians welcome the U.S. forces not with flowers but with bullets. And even when Iran's forces are forced to retreat under pressure from both foreign forces, the mullahs who wield power in Tehran pin their hopes on a desperate and deadly gambit that, if it works, will destroy the homelands of the nations the Iranians call the Great and Lesser Satans.
But Coyle's talent lies not just with the description of grand strategy, the tactics and weapons used in war, but with the very human portrayal of his cast of characters. Whether he is writing about Major Scott Dixon of the U.S. Army or Junior Lieutenant Nikolai Ilvanich of the Soviet Army, Coyle wisely doesn't resort to the stereotypical "good guy vs. bad guy" style of storytelling. Yes, this is a novel of war, but Coyle (a former Army officer who served in Desert Storm) has genuine affection for the profession of arms and the men and women who serve their country, no matter which country it is.
Rating: 2
Summary: It's Something . . . But Not A Novel
Comment: "Sword Point" is officially a novel, but it reads more like a popular history of a war that never happened. The style recalls books by Cornelius ("The Longest Day") Ryan and Walter ("Day of Infamy") Lord that I read and enjoyed decades ago. The action cuts back and forth between small groups of participants in different parts of the action, creating a mosaic-like picture of what's going on. This kind of writing makes for page-turning history (though you generally have to go elsewhere for the Big Picture), but flat and uninvolving fiction.
I'm tempted to call Coyle's characters one-dimensional, but that would misrepresent them. It's not (I think) that he tried to write about three-dimensional people and failed, but that he wasn't really interested in the characters *as* people in the first place. Coyle's soldiers are defined by their jobs, not by what they think or feel or say. I found it hard, as a result, to *care* much about any of them. Usually, in a book like this, there's *somebody* whose storyline I'm impatient to get back to. In "Sword Point," there wasn't.
None of this is meant to suggest that "Sword Point" is a bad *book.* It's actually a very good book--a worthy successor to the work of Ryan and Lord--and I learned a lot from it. It is, however, a dismal failure as a *novel.* Proceed at your own risk.
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Title: Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III by Harold W. Coyle ISBN: 0425110427 Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: March, 1994 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Code Of Honor by Harold Coyle ISBN: 0671510290 Publisher: Pocket Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1995 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: The Ten Thousand by Harold Coyle ISBN: 0671885650 Publisher: Pocket Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1994 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Against All Enemies by Harold Coyle ISBN: 0765341697 Publisher: Forge Pub. Date: 17 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: God's Children by Harold Coyle ISBN: 0812575385 Publisher: Forge Pub. Date: 03 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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