Rating: 
Summary: Solid but not spectacular¿¿
Review: All things considered, Battle Born was an enjoyable book but, in my opinion, not among Brown's best efforts. The novel is set in the period following Brown's previous work, Fatal Terrain. The premise itself of reunification of the Korean Peninsula was an interesting one that flowed naturally from the geopolitical and economic situation in place at the end of Fatal Terrain. With many of Brown's usual characters back again, there is a sense of familiarity for the fans of Brown's high-tech military thrillers. The setup for the story was well conceived and certainly held the reader's attention. The only thing holding back a higher rating for Battle Born was the way the conclusion itself unfolded.....seemingly out of proportion to the build-up. The ending seemed to happen all to quickly, leaving the reader with gaps in the resolution of certain characters which, if included, would have made for a more compelling work overall.
Rating: 
Summary: Battle Boring
Review: I have always been a fan of techno/military novels from The Cruel Sea to Kilo Class, but this one just left me cold. I've read a couple of books by this author and found some of the early ones quite entertaining. Things have gone downhill. Each successive book is a flawed clone of its predecessor, and this one reached new lows in character development and plot. I got half way through the book and found I didn't like a single character in it and didn't care about the outcome. This is the first book that I have not wanted to read to completion in about 5 years
Rating: 
Summary: Hard Hitting, Cannot Put Down
Review: Read the other reviews, and feel that this is really a great book. The hard military component, mixed with the fiction makes it great. History is still unfolding, parts of the technology presented is real. (If you read aircraft industry text, Mr. Brown has a uncanny way of predicting the future.). I've read all of dale brown books, and cant wait for the next one. Well worth the money and the time.
Rating:
Summary: wal-mart special
Review: this book is typical of the soft covers wal-mart sells and my wife brings home. this time i was with her and it still didn't help. there was a lot of factual? material and much speculation, seeing that i have newer been invited to groom lake. it is just not well done, i tended to skip some of the junk but i read the whole dreary book.
Rating:
Summary: This book needs work
Review: This is Dale Brown's worst! This book is purely action with no character development or anything interesting. It is way to predictable and is really corny. The opening flying scene is HORRIBLE! I only recommend this book to someone who wants a quick read of some action.
Rating:
Summary: battle born
Review: Dale Brown has done it again!! This book was read in one six and half hour sitting and is totally unputdownable this guy really knows aviation please keep them coming.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing - Dale needs a rest.
Review: Despite perfect print and excellent cover of a european paperback edition the contents of Dale's latest are dissappointing.Battle Born lacks typical Dale's dramaturgy and is a pure techno-gizmo that is absolutely boring nor entertaining. It looks like Dale was bound to produce something by a certain date (by a contract, for example) and that was what he did. Wasted money and time.
Rating: 
Summary: Born again Brown
Review: After a long gestation: "Battle Born". If you like Dale Brown, Stephen Coonts, et al, then you'll climb aboard this book and have a thunderingly good time. All Brown's heroic types are there: Mclanahan, Luger, etc. The bad guys are all inherently unstable, and unable to think as clearly or as logically as the good ol' U.S. fly-boys. (And when I say enemies, I am not saying Brown's racist at all. Anyone who disagrees with Mclanahan & Co. is an enemy - U.S. citizen, Korean politician, Red Chinese Minister... they're all enemies. This may hint of paranoia... but even paranoid people get killed.) This book is Brown back doing what he does best: write about U.S. military aircraft and the folk who fly them into danger. Brown's put together another unlikely scenario, made it feel real, and created high adventure out of it. Good stuff. Long may Brown continue writing. Because while his books may have only the vaguest grasp of real-politik, they are bloody good fun.
Rating: 
Summary: Battle Born
Review: Really lame and not worth the price!!! Exciting beginning with in depth detail of combat flying. The moment it leaves that and goes to geopolitical and military, the realism leaves completely. The basis for the story sounded intriging, but was not addressed in such a manner as to make it even remotely believable. It is a shame. It started so well.
Rating:
Summary: Again?
Review: In "Battle Born", as in many of the Dale Brown novels, a massive geo-political shift - Taiwanese independence, the Post-Soviet Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the Chinese invasion of the Phillipines - coincides with some revolutionary innovation in military technology. In "Battle Born", the global crisis is a sloppy attempt to re-unite the two Koreas insigated by the South but reliant on help from numerous sympathizers in the north. Because support is not universal among the North's military, some nuclear armed Communist units escape the disintegration and carry on their war against the south from the far north, near the Chinese border. Because the reunifiation brings many of the North's nuclear weapons into the hands of the previously nuclear-free south, nuclear war seems inevitable. Luckily, the US Air Force has finalized development of new weapons designed to hunt down ICBMs in the most vulnerable aspect of their flight - boost-phase. So the stage is set for hi-tech aviation to save the world from nuclear destruction. Again. Little of Battle Born differs from "Fatal Terrain" or Brown's other books - we have the exhaustive descriptions not only of the new weapons, but also how they use existing hardware as well as the administrative nuts and bolts of how these weapons will be deployed. And since much of the hardware is built on existing goodies - upgraded B-1's; the ICBM hunting missile mounted on the old Short Range Attack Missile; upgraded scud missiles - as is common in Dale Brown books, reader understanding depends on being familiar with the technology of military aviation. A clear link between existing technology and the cutitng edge technology of the Brown books is intended to make "Battle Born" plausible. Unfortunately, accurate details is one of 2, not neccesarrily exclusive routes towards realism in the technothriller. The flying scenes in "Firefox" (the novel) and its sequel "Firefox Down" achieve a rarified level of realism despite the fact that MiG-31 of those books was entirely fictional and remains so 25 years later. Nevertheless, the sensations of the human protagonists in "Firefox" - the burnt out combat vet overwhelmed by his stolen Russian jet - overwhelm any sense of unrealism simply because they overwhelm a charachter that the author has convinced us to identify with. In contrast, the charachters in "Battle Born" are just organic components of the machines they fly and the hardware never seems to feel as much a real airplane as a highly detailed model, like something you'd see in the display case of a hobby store. Also, revolutionary technology and revolutionary innovations of existing technology aren't the same. It's hard to appreciate what Brown's new B-1 can do when failing to adequately make the reader appreciate what the old B-1B could do, and what it couldn't. Brown makes one real effort to showcase the existing B-1B - but that takes place in one extended sequence involving wargames early in the book, and is so weighed down by dialog involving seemingly meaningless jargon that, even when it's understandable, slows the action to a crawl. While real B-1 is supposed to have a high-subsonic speed, Brown's variant seems to top off no-faster than the Wright Flyer. Because the B-1 remains a cypher of an airplane rather than a machine whose limits can be appreciated, it's evolved cousin is only an improvement of a cypher and can't be appreciated either. Brown's books are clearly meant to appeal to readers who "fly" military flight simulators on their PC's or just read a lot of books about military aviation. Yet, while flight simulators become more intensely realistic with each year, Brown's depiction of the basics of flight remain unchanged since "Flight of the Old Dog" of 1987. As always, the men and women who populate Brown's world manage to have perfectly normal, even extended conversations while flying his high-performance, high-tech, highly demanding planes. I kept having to remind myself that the two USAF generals discussing the funding, development and deployment of their new plasma weapons were at the controls of an F-111 in flight, and not in some stuffy corner of the Pentagon. Also like all Brown books, there are really two stories: the geo-political story and the story of the heroes - those daring American pilots who go to war our leaders have started. The American story differs little from those of Brown's other novels. Instead of charachter development, every player gets a dossier, and few depart from it. There is none of the charachter introspection of say Stephen Coomnts' Jake Grafton ("Cuba") or "Maverick" Mitchell for that matter. Nevertheless the political side shows a daring new side. Absent are the terrorists, crazed Irani fundamentalists, Sun-Tzu quoting Maoists, dishonest Gorbachev-Marxists and unhinged, deep-plant KGB spies relied on to drive the other books. None of the protagonists here want a revolution. Instead of a few crazed would-be conquerors, we have the governments of the major powers unhinged by rogue North Koreans who lob nuclear scuds. A war is less the result of one incredibly bad decision than hundreds of smaller decisions that only seem bad when accumulated in hindisght. Brown highlights this new direction when describing debates between the military heads of the now united Korea over how to best use their cache of communist-built nuclear weapons. The loudest voices of restraint come from the ex-North! In short, "Battle Born" shows hints of a new direction for Dale Brown, offering much to appeal to fans of technothrillers, but little to anybody else.
| 
