6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Sloppily written, poorly edited, breathtakingly inept., September 5, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Battle Front: USA vs. Militia: #3 (Mass Market Paperback)
If you like Clancy, run away!
A planned attack by one sort of aircraft turns into an attack by another sort of aircraft - why?
An officer taken prisoner is found, just two pages later, leading a counter-attack - how?
A column that suffers almost no losses becomes, somehow, combat ineffective - when?
I bought this book looking for a new author. If I liked this one, I'd have gone back and ordered the lot, as I did with, for example, Harold Coyle.
Not this fellow. He's off the list.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
good adventure, flawed area knowledge and research, August 23, 1998
This review is from: Battle Front: USA vs. Militia: #3 (Mass Market Paperback)
Slater churns out about one good adventure story per year, and _Battle Front_ qualifies. He doesn't know us (Americans, Westerners, Washingtonians) as well as he thinks he does, but he writes an entertaining yarn.
He also has some rather appropriate ongoing mild revenge against us in the area of vocabulary and slang. As American authors have been butchering Canadian and Australian argot in novels for quite some time, we should not complain when Slater has rural Americans using British Columbia slang such as 'Holy!' and referring to one another, Aussie style, as 'cheeky bastards'. I reside in the eastern part of Washington and we don't sound like that, plain and simple. _Battle Front_ is not particularly well researched, but it is useful in that it shows us ourselves imagined through Canadian eyes not far across the border: stereotypically ignorant, bigoted and blindly fundamentalist. (He is right that we have such; he is wrong that they are in the majority, and he is also wrong that pro-militia sentiment is dominated by them. The reality is that to get together the militias in such numbers as Slater postulates, they could not help being leavened by a good number of intelligent, reasonable people who know better than to blame Jews or Japanese or whomever for the bungling of the Federal government.)
His understanding and concept of the National Guard in the US is also flawed. _Battle Front_ perpetuates the Slater tradition of portraying our Guardsmen as clueless, timid dorks unwilling to take any real risks and insubordinate to their officers. While it is true that discipline and military bearing are more relaxed in the Guard, they are not a bunch of cowards and fools. Just because a Guardsman said "F*** you, Lieutenant, I only do this on weekends!" in the movie _First Blood_ does not mean that one could expect that from Guardsmen as regular behavior. The Guard has performed well virtually every time it has been called upon, come peace or war. In researching his next book Slater should spend some time on maneuvers with them and form an educated picture.
I recommend _Battle Front_ not only as an action-packed adventure story, but particularly to my fellow Washingtonians and Americans as a glimpse of a new truth: as genuinely unaware as typical Americans are of Canada and indeed most other countries, people in those countries know us no better than we know them. Perhaps a bit more research is in order, eh?
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Battle Front : USA Vs. Militia, May 30, 2000
This review is from: Battle Front: USA vs. Militia: #3 (Mass Market Paperback)
Ive read most of Ian Slaters WWIII and USA vs Militia for those of you saying his characters are to thin go back and read all his books from the start he tells very in depth details into there lives such as the Brentwood family there are very good story lines behind his characters i wouldnt recommned just jumping into the series or you will get lost.
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