Customer Reviews

Bringing up the brass;: My 55 years at West Point,

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I've been a fan since childhood of "The Long Gray Line," the John Ford film that was based on this book, and so I've wanted to read "Bringing Up the Brass" for a long time. Finally doing so was a rewarding experience -- not only (although mostly) to meet the real Marty Maher behind the Tyrone Power character, but also to see what was gained and what was lost when the novel was adapted to the screen.

If, like me, you come to this book through the prism of the movie, you'll find this story a lot less linear than the movie. Although Marty tells his story (and it's clear from the text that most of this book was literally "as told to" his coauthor Nardi Reeder Campion) in a mostly chronological way, there's still a bit of skipping around and some gaps in the time-frame. Not everything fits together quite as well as it does in the film, but life is like that. The book also lacks much of the movie's schmaltzy sentimentality.

At the same time, the reader who knows the movie will be able to recognize many of the seeds in this book that grew into key scenes on film.

The more interesting and honest task, though, is to try to separate the movie from the book and read (and review) the latter on its own merits. When you do, Marty comes across as a charming and entertaining man with an interesting story to tell. He saw an awful lot in his half-century-plus at West Point, and does seem to have been truly beloved by generations of graduates. He certainly could have filled many more pages with his reminiscences, and it's perhaps a shame that he didn't. I would have liked to have read more about life on the Point and how it changed over the decades.

But this book is Marty's story, not West Point's, and while the two were nearly synonymous -- or so it seems -- for many decades, many people have told the Academy's story. It was up to Marty and his co-author to tell his own, and it's a wonderful thing that he did. He's a man who deserves to be remembered, and remembered with affection -- not only by those who had a chance to know him, but also by those of us who have only experienced him in film or print.