Customer Reviews

Battle Born (Random House Large Print)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Unlike some, I wasn't too disappointed with Dale Brown's last book, "The Tin Man", I kind of enjoyed it in a Robocop kind of way. Besides, Dale showed guts in trying something different.

But now "Battle Born". This is what I've been waiting for. Fast paced, fast flying, missiles firing action of the sort that Brown does best. While I'm not going to say if this is his best book yet (I'll have to re-read the previous 11 books and decide), it will grip you, haul you in and refuse to let you put it down until you finish the last page. The politics are not too far-fetched, the technology may well exist already and his characterisations are as good as ever. This book could be seen as a true sequel to Flight of The Old Dog, finally retiring the EB-52 with the introduction of the... nah, you'll have to read it to find out. When's the next one coming out? If it's better than "Battle Born", Amazon better change its top rating to TEN stars.

Military fiction novelist Dale brown has finally published,after a long wait mind you, his newest novel called "Battle Born". I personnaly received the book on last Thursday from the publisher. I hasten to say that this is the best Dale Brown novel to date. It only took two days to read this 390+ page novel. I just could not put the book down. Patrick McLanahan, Dave Luger and the rest of the Megafortress crew rejoin in this novel performing operations at the relatively new Elliot Air Force Base. And yes the rumors are true, this is new "Megafortress-2". It is a bigger and badder HAWC creation. I wont ruin anything from the book, but war erupts over Korea again and here comes the new EB-1C. As always, Elliot Air Force Base runs the risk of being shut down. Like I said earlier, this is my favorite military fiction novel of all time. I guess I can I am kinda bent toward this novel because I am currently a memeber of the 28th Bomb Wing of Ellsworth A.F.B., South Dakota. Dale came here last spring to get source material for this book. He kindly gives some hearty kudos in the book to the people here at Ellsworth. I will close this review with three words, "BUY THIS BOOK".

Take care all and read books!

After the comic-strip exploits of THE TIN MAN, Dale Brown returns to airborne action with BATTLE BORN. And man, is there plenty of it or what? In this entertaining story, North Korea is developing nuclear, chemical and bio warfare while its population, and small military units, are in the grip of famine. During a joint Japan-South Korea-US war game in the Pacific, South Korean forces break away and invade the North. This causes a renegade North Korean Army officer to launch a low level nuke-chem-bio strike on the South. As the dust settles, and the North Korean military mutinies against its leaders, China shows an interest, feeling threatened by the new United Korea. Meanwhile, in the US, General Patrick McLanahan, our ongoing hero, is training a motley crew of B-1B Lancer pilots hard as their airbase is threatened with closure. This gives Dale some opportunity to bring in some new characters, and also re-introduce old ones such as Rebecca Catherine Furness, the heroine of CHAINS OF COMMAND, who is romancing Rinc Seaver, a washed out bombardier who lost his crew at the start during an exercise. And when tensions mount in Korea and China, McLanahan has to speed up training his wannabe Top Guns on the new EB-1 Megafortress-2, with awesome new technologies such as laser 3-d radar(LADAR)and the LANCELOT plasma anti-satellite weapon. Plus an assortment of cruise missiles among others! Will his new Megafortress crews prevent the Third World War? Once again, Dale Brown goes for action all the way. He has done extremely well to continue using his old faces such as McLanahan, Dave Luger, Hal Briggs and so on from previous novels and bring in a host of new ones on top. The Korean side of the action is also well crafted, and considering events in recent months in North Korea, this scenario could well happen, crazy as it sounds. The futuristic weaponry is feasible - submarine action author Michael diMercurio has also utitlised the plasma weapon, albeit in torpedo form in PIRANHA FIRING POINT, Brown shows its possible airborne capabilities in such a way that he could design it himself! And make it work! As he has done with BATTLE BORN. Well done Dale Brown.

No pun intended on the heading, but this book has it's moments and it has it's dead spots. The technojargon is easy to pass over (a la Clancy)and sometimes he seems to be doing it for its own sake. Some of the chapters are riveting and you hope for the next one to follow, sometimes to be dissapointed. The interpersonal relationships, especially of the US flight crews, are well done. I also have read all of the Brown books. This called for more of a suspension of belief than most. However,if what he writes about going on in N.Korea has anything to do with reality, and I suspect it does, our current leadership is not going to come out anywhere near as well as President Martindale did, and neither will the country. Worth reading, but maybe you should wait for paperback.

I have always enjoyed Mr. Brown's work. "The Tin Man" ruined what had been a unbroken string of great work. This book is a first rate Dale Brown adventure. The book is well written, maintains a steady, fast pace that fans have loved since the original "Flight Of The Old Dog". I read the nearly 400 page book in 24 hours, it's that good. Dale Brown the original is back and at his best, and some old and new friends have come with him. "The Tin Man" is dead or in OZ which is where he should have stayed. Welcome back Dale Brown!

Dale Brown returns with another aerial techno-thriller, after delving into a James Bondish yarn in Tin Man. This book, Battle Born, was not his best, but it wasn't bad either. 500+ pages and most of it was spent in building up a crew in Nevada to fly modified B-1Bs against ballistic missles.

The main storyline has South Korea coming into possesion of a nuclear weapon. Then after months of infiltrating North Korea with spys and helping to fight their poverty situation, the South Koreans attack, and most N. Koreans revolt against their fellow Communists to overthrow that form of government, effectively uniting Korea.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. a dysfunctional Air National Guard unit is being tested by Gen. Patrick McLanahan over the Nevada deserts in B-1B's. Dreamland is testing plasma-yield weapons as well as antiballilistic missles.

Back overseas, a United Korea has found a stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), i.e. chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. A leftover crew of loyal North Koreans, still with some WMD's launch an attack on the Southern part of Korea. The defense minister, Kim of United Korea, believes China launched the attack, and wants President Kwon to retaliate against the Chinese with nuclear weapons.

Hence, lies the political and military struggle for the rest of the book. China invades the northern part of Korea, while the
B1-B crews get their act together to keep Northeast Asia from becoming a nuclear wasteland.

Most of the book is dialogue, both normal and technical as only Brown can deliver. Some good aerial sequences, especially near the end.

gMissile one awayc launcher rotatingc missile two awayc missile three away!h As the aircraft released the missiles, suddenly, the enemy missile disappeared, not even having an explosion. The name of this book, gBattle Bornh really fits the plot of this story. The aircraft on the cover also shows the aircraft that is being used in the story, allowing us to imagine what is going on. This story starts at Korea, where the World War II is about to start. An unidentified aircraft runs into South Korea carrying a nuclear weapon. This incident threatened all the countries throughout the world. In the United States, General Samson had developed the Lancelot program, which will later become the strongest antiballistic weapon. To develop and lead the B-1 Lancers, Patrick McLanahan entered the secret base in Nevada. While the U.S. developed the Lancelot program, other countries were moving too... As reading this story, I had felt as if I was actually living in this story, watching all this happen. I think this is a great book and I recommend it.

Every so often one of my favorite authors decides to seek another venue, and forsakes the old favorites. Harold Coyle did it with the Civil War and Dale Brown did it with Tin Man. Mr. Coyle made the mistake of continuing with his sojourn. Thank God Dale Brown returned to the venue which serves his readers best. This is an exciting military aviation thriller and I hope Dale Brown writes many more of these type novels.

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.

Battle Born is great! I think reviews are most effective when you compare the book in question to others that most of us have read, so prospective readers have something to measure it against. Battle Born could be best described as a military thriller novel of action, suspense, and intrigue--with the relentless pace and stunning power of war novels like The Triumph and the Glory and The Bridges of Toko-ri, the plot twists of Grisham at his best, a theme worthy of Clancy's Clear and Present Danger, and an authoritative style that reflects Dale Brown's expertise in this genre.