Rating: Summary: ONE OF THE BEST Review: You've got read this book. It's extrodanary, superb, awsome, fantastic, defiant, unique, and definitley worth reading, if you ask me. This is the second greatest war novel ever written. It stands right behind CATCH-22 and right ahead of THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI. Stephen Crane did a wonderful job, unlike some authors. Everything is well discribed, from the setting, to the action, and even to the emotions and feelings of the main character, Henry. I would definitley recomend this book to anyone with the power to read.
Rating: Summary: I HATED THIS BOOK WITH A PASSION Review: THIS BOOK WAS TOTALLY BORING. I HAD TO READ IT FOR SCHOOL AND IT TOTALLY BROUGHT DOWN MY AVERAGE BECAUS I WAS NOT THE LEAST BIT INTERESTED. I DO NOT RECOMMEND YOU READ IT. AND IT IS NOT THE FACT THAT I DID NOT UNDERSTAND IT BECAUSE I READ SILAS MARNER AND IT WAS WONDERFUL.
Rating: Summary: Over Rated But This Is Where Hemingway Stole His Style Review: I came away from this novel with disappointed expectations. While the novel pre-dates modernism, "Courage" clearly influenced Hemingway and all that followed him.Maybe because this novel was at the beginning of a wave of anti-war novels, it doesn't seem fresh anymore. Or maybe it really isn't that good and is gliding on a High School english reputation. I am reading his collection of short stories.
Rating: Summary: Boring and hard to understand Review: I really did not enjoy this book because it was very bland and everything had to have a description after it. I thin you should just stick to the basic ideas and express one clear thought in order to have a good story.
Rating: Summary: Not very pleasing Review: I was optimistic at first, but this story is very repetitive and boring! It lacked many key qualities that a story needs! It was very hard to get interested in it and it was very hard to understand!
Rating: Summary: They need to have negative ratings... Review: This book was awful. I have never had a book read for school be THIS bad. Awful. Simply awful.
Rating: Summary: Innovative look at war's effect on men who actually fight it Review: When we play chess, what is always the first piece we sacrifice to achieve victory? The pawn, of course. The front line soldier that is always expendable. I am not that great a chess player but in my somewhat lacking strategies, I have even often used my pawn as bait to try and draw out my opponent's "more valuable" pieces into a trap. Nevermind what happens to that poor pawn. In this Civil War novel, Stephen Crane invites us into the mind of just such a pawn. We see that he is not a mindless toy soldier, but an enlightened young man full of optimism and bravado, with family and friends back home and dreams of glory. We also see that as he is exposed to the dreadful realities of combat, he is all too human. He experiences fear as he turns and runs for his life, and senses a crushing shame at realizing his buddies stayed behind to fight. The burden of his shame is so oppressive that he can't deal with it in mundane terms and mentally creates an alternate reality in which HE is the hero because he retreated while his friends are the failures for foolishly staying behind to die in vain. But by a twist of fate, his misfortunes are reversed and he discovers courage within himself that he feared didn't exist. Crane shows us this by taking us into battle so that we witness how this mortal young man deals with the stress of combat and finds inner strength by focusing on his task and nothing else, not even the possibility of his own death. We even see the "pawn's" hatred for the "king", as he inwardly fumes at the arrogant general who insultingly refers to him and his companions as "mule drivers". Next time you watch a Civil War film and you see soldiers topple over by the hundreds with each volley fired by the other side, remember this example of the nameless infantryman who, despite not being a celebrated general in all the newspaper stories, is indeed a human being with dreams and desires and intelligent thoughts who has to be the actual one to lay all that on the line by fighting the battle. Kudos to Mr. Crane, who wrote this book despite being born after the Civil War, for having a keen ear to the stories of the common footsoldiers who, as veterans, gave him a vivid glimpse of what it is like to be sent into battle by men on horses who didn't really care whether they lived or died.
Rating: Summary: Attention deficite disorder, anyone? Review: Anyone who finds this short little novel boring or hard to read either has a mammoth case of Attention Deficite Disorder or has the IQ of Forrest Gump. Of course it doesn't help that people are "forced" to read anything in school. It's better to discover a great novel like this on your own.
Rating: Summary: I have to read this one again Review: The Red Badge of Courage is a book I have mixed feelings about...maybe part of the problem is that it was required for a Civil War class, and I never enjoy required readings as much. One thing I didn't like was that Crane kept referring to characters like Henry as "the boy" or Jim as "the tall soldier"...that got kind of old. I think the book lost some of its effectiveness because I've seen so many war movies...but these are, of course, based on Crane's book. I wasn't aware of the symbolic nature of the novel when I read it...I'll have to go back now that I know the basic plot and see if I can dig in any deeper.
Rating: Summary: American, yes! Classic, no! Review: First things first. I found myself having a hard time understanding the language. I had my hopes up when I started to read this book but was very disapointed. I couldn't even finish the darn thing because it was so hard to read and the fact that it was boring didn't help either.I read chapter after chapter hoping it will get better but it turned out to be a disapointment from the start. We all know this is an American book, but who would claim it to be a classic, I can't understand.
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