This Week's Suggested Book from the Ashbrook Center (Sunday, May 02, 2010)
 | | Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War
by Karl Marlantes |
Atlantic Monthly Press 592 pages, March 2010 Hardcover, 24.95 ISBN: 080211928X
A percentage of the proceeds from your purchase of this book from Amazon.com will benefit the Ashbrook Center.
Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.
Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire worldboth its horrors and its thrillsand seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.
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