Dog Soldiers [Paperback]

Robert Stone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 1997

In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers - and the price of survival was dangerously high.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Like Michael Herr's Dispatches, Robert Stone's National Book Award-winning novel Dog Soldiers trades on a hallucinatory vision of Vietnam as a place in which all honor and morality are ceded to the mere business of survival -- and, better, survival with personal profit. "This is the place where everybody finds out who they are," says the novel's protagonist, the journalist Converse, to which his friend and partner in crime Ray Hicks replies, "What a bummer for the gooks." Converse convinces Hicks to smuggle a shipment of heroin back to the United States, renegade CIA agents pop up, and all hell breaks loose in this beautifully written, dark study of the soul in anguish. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

ROBERT STONE is the acclaimed author of seven novels and two story collections, including Dog Soldiers, winner of the National Book Award, and Bear and His Daughter, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2006.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Reprint edition (April 2, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395860253
• ISBN-13: 978-0395860250
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #330,778 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ROBERT STONE is the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (winner of the National Book Award), A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls. His story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2006.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece! The best novel I've ever read! May 24, 1999

By Sam Mills

Format:Paperback

If you came of age in the late 60's and early 70s (as I did) and found yourself at the center of the counterculture (in my case, Madison, Wisconsin), you'll recognize all of the characters who people this extraordinary story. In no book I've read are they rendered with such precision and invested with such uncanny life. Charmian, the heroine dealer, is the most sensuous femme fatale in American Literature. There's Danskin, the hippie narc, turned by the feds to surveil the counterculture -- a far more convincing psychopath than Hannibel Lecter. There's Smitty, the jailbird 'muscle', for Antheil, the 'bent' DEA agent. There's Converse's own mother, nursing home-bound and lost in paranoid dementia -- and my personal favorite, Eddie Peace, the wheeler-dealer who supplies drugs to the Hollywood film community. And these are only the supporting cast. Converse, Hicks and Marge are the richest, deepest, most dimensional protagonists in recent fiction. The story is at once twisting, turning action-adventure (it was made into the wonderful movie, 'Who'll Stop The Rain,' with Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld and Michael Moriarty, all perfectly cast) as well as a dark parable of the Manson-flavored decline of the Woodstock Generation. Briefly, John Converse, a playwright, has decided to escape a degrading job (he writes for his father-in-law's skin magazines ('Woman Impaled by Falling Skydiver!')) and failing marriage and becomes a freelance journalist in Vietnam. As his tour draws to a close, he has a brainstorm: Buy two kilos of pure, Golden Triangle heroine, smuggle it back into the US and reap the enormous profits. For the smuggling, he calls on old friend Ray Hicks, a merchant marine who's a student of Nietsche and Zen, and 'cultivates the art of self-defense.' Hicks agrees to carry John's skag when the USS Coral Sea departs Vietnam for San Francisco. Trouble is, Charmian's tipped off Antheil, the crooked DEA agent, and he (in the persons of Danskin and Smitty) are waiting for Hicks when he delivers the heroin to Converse's wife, Marge. A page-turning chase ensues that takes Marge and Hicks into the dark netherworld of the Los Angeles drug scene (circa 1970) and ends at a New Mexico commune very like Ken Kesey's own psychedelic ranch. (Stone was one of the drivers on Kesey's bus, 'Further.' Imagine, Ken Kesey, Robert Stone and various Beat poets (Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, et al.) on the same bus! An astonishing time and place!) I can't overstate the excellence of this masterpiece. More than any since Conrad's and Hemingway's (writers Stone's often compared to) this novel confirms that classic quality and rivetting story are not mutually exclusive categories. His two subsequent novels, 'A Flag For Sunrise' and 'Children of Light' are both excellent -- as was his first novel, 'Hall of Mirrors.' ('Flag' may be as good as 'Dog Soldiers.') If you found his last two novels, 'Outerbridge Reach' and 'Damascus Gate,' a bit slow-going and overly 'philosophical,' be advised that early Robert Stone had a much better balance between story and theme.

Also recommended: The 13th Valley by John M. Del Vecchio The Short Timers by Gustaf Hasford The White Album by Joan Didion Rads by Tom Bates Famous Long Ago by Ray Mungo The Stoned Apocalypse by Marco Vassi Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan Going Away by Clancy Sigal

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars yes, a masterpiece,etc -- but READ ON: March 2, 2001

By Allan MacInnis

Format:Paperback

Stone's DOG SOLDIERS is a fine book, but if you happen to see this without exploring the rest of the reviews on Amazon -- access them. The novel was assigned as a high school project in Iowa, and the kids who had to read it seem to have flocked en masse online (perhaps part of the project) to review it. I found reading these reviews very entertaining, and recommend the experience to anyone, though it won't tell you much about the book. I like kids, what can I say. Now that that's out of the way, Stone is one of the most important (and most strangely neglected) writers of the 20th Century. I think comparisons with Hemingway and Conrad are a bit off the mark; this novel is far more reminiscent of COMEDIANS-era Graham Greene, in his troubled Catholicism and concern for the decline of religion in the 20th Century. While Stone is hardly interested in promulgating any particular religious point of view, he IS a moralist, and a scathing critic of what we've become without a sense of God. This novel can be read, I think, as a crucifixion myth of sorts, made relevant to the 20th Century. It IS dark, but it's brilliantly paced and written, and a fairly accurate look at the time it deals with. Stone, by the way, talks of a recurring dream he has, where he's bringing drugs or contraband into a country, usually on a ship, and knows that he is about to be caught. This motif informs the paranoid tenor of the novel. A final point: the title has nothing to do with Lakota warrior societies, and is a bit of a misappropriation. It appears to be a reference to the proverb "better a living dog than a dead lion," which Converse muses on in the text. The outstanding performances by Michael Moriarity as Converse and Richard Masur (who usually seems to have a limited range) as Danskin are two really good reasons to see the film...

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars good good good March 27, 2002

By Gordon Smith

Format:Paperback

I read this book for a college course on the cold war. I couldn't believe my professor. He actually apologized for putting it on the curriculum! He said that it was perhaps too gross, or graphic.... or something. How insulting!...How are we s'poseta learn about the cold war if the teachers teach with sterilized kid gloves. This book is, to Vietnam, a more accessible version of what Gravity's Rainbow is to WWII. It's harsh but not without redemption. Dog soldiers is goods good good...