Customer Reviews

First Blood

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Morrell became famous with this great novel. This book is nothing like the movies. In the movies Rambo is the clear cut hero while Will Teasle is the "Red Neck Sherriff" out to get someone who looks different. In the book there is not clear cut "good guy" or "bad guy." Both Rambo and Teasle are responsible for what happends. Both had a chance to let it go but don't. Rambo is going through a psychological hell in his mind when trying not to kill again but being forced to in his mind. Teasle who loses several close people in his life and is in the middle of a personal crisis at home. Both were heroes in different wars. Teasle was a hero in the Korean War while Rambo got the medal of honor for his work in Vietnam. This is a great psychological read. Both men think they are right and will not stop until the other is not breathing. Which one will win? Who is right and who is wrong? Also if you buy the book to read for the 1st time do NOT read the introduction if you don't want the ending spoiled.

You are a war hero, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, finally back stateside and your welcome home has been dubious at best. Your mind is jumbled up and you don't know what you want to do so you start traveling around the country. You hitchhike or ride the bus when you can and walk otherwise. You camp out in the woods and live off the land as you are trained to do.

You are a law abiding citizen. You love your country, you fought for your country, and you've KILLED for your country. You are a trained killing machine, a weapon of mass destruction, sprung tight and ready to go off with provocation and provoke you they do. In town after town you have been rousted, not because of anything you've done but because of your scruffy appearance.

John Rambo is passing through Madison, Kentucky and decides to get a hamburger but as usual it's not that simple. Chief of Police, Wilfred Teasle has other ideas. He doesn't want any riffraff in his town so he picks the kid up and drives him to the edge of town, He wasn't particularly nasty about it, in fact he tried to be pleasant, determined but pleasant, but he wasn't so pleasant later when he found the kid in the local diner. He told the waitress to put the kid's order in a bag and hustled him back out of town. By now Teasle was very annoyed, so he went and parked on a side street and kept watch to make sure the kid did not walk back into town.

For his part the kid (Rambo) had reached his limit. If someone was going to push him, he was going to push back. He was determined to go back and confront the Chief and make him back down but of course Teasle had other ideas. He arrested the kid, took him to jail, hosed him down and started to give him a haircut and a shave.

Now, Rambo was an escaped POW. He was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese and was tortured relentlessly before escaping, so when the deputies tried to shave him with a straight razor, he flipped out and grabbed the razor and slashed a deputy that reached for his gun.

Thus began an odyssey of death and mayhem in the nearby mountains and eventually destroyed a good part of Madison.

CONCLUSION

Most of you are probably aware that a movie was made from this book. Because of this I need to make comparisons to the movie.

The Book

This was David Morrell's first book and for a first book it showed phenomenal presence. The book was a pleasure to read. Morrell used easy to understand language and the novel moved right along smoothly. It contains cover to cover action and there's never a dull moment, literally the story seemed to jump out at you.

The macho macho plot seems to revolve around saving some perceived face. Teasle thinks if he backs down he would be setting a precedent and his little town would soon be inundated with drugs and undesirables, a ridiculous notion. On the other hand Rambo probably could have avoided confrontation if he'd have been forthcoming about his service, status and his medal. Instead he was close lipped and brought the confrontation to a head. At first you seem to pull for Rambo as being unjustly persecuted but ultimately he proves to be an out of control trained killer who is in a preservation mode - exactly as he was trained.

The Movie

In short the book was excellent but it was much more violent than the movie, which I'd seen first, so I felt it was much more violent than it needed to be. For example in the movie only one deputy gets killed almost accidentally and the viewer felt he deserved it.

In the book, Rambo was determined to kill everyone who came after him including the bloodhounds and he was good at his job. In the movie Rambo was not quite as psychotic and because of this you empathized with him as the underdog. I guess I feel that the book was great but honestly, I enjoyed the movie more.

A personal war between two American military heroes is about to break out in the hills of rural Kentucky. David Morrell delivers a solid, intense, action/adventure. Morrell digs deep into the characters of John Rambo, a Vietnam veteran pushed to the edge by Wilfred Teasle, a Korean war veteran and now chief of police of Madison, Kentucky. Col. Sam Trautman joins the life and death struggle through the woods, hills, and caves as the body count rises. Make no mistake; this is a very different story from the film version starring Sly Stallone. A great fast read. Very entertaining with some great chase sequences and awesome ending.

You know this is going to be very different from the movie when the first paragraph describes Rambo as "a skinny kid with a long beard." If the movie of First Blood had been a faithful adaptation we'd possibly have a film masterpiece of action and the philosophy of violence in the style of Akira Kurosawa instead of the symbol of 1980's jingoism that Rambo has become a household name for. This is one mean book that seems to have been written while Morrell was on an adrenaline high. Morrell forsakes the usual conventions of thriller novels by abandoning the typical romantic interest and even clearly defined heros and villains and leaves us with a story that is simpler but much more riveting. We have two characters, Rambo and Teasle, neither particularly "good guys" but not really "bad guys" either. One is a fat conservitive on the side of law and order and the other is a poor, grungy fellow who just wants to be left to his own business. Both of these characters are too prideful to give an inch and the result of their pride is massive bloodshed, could this be a parable to the Vietnam war? Maybe, but more importantly its a rough, tough, superbly intense thriller that will keep you on the edge of the seat from start to finish. By all means check it out.

Possibly the best action/adventure book you'll find anywhere. It certainly is the best I've ever read. I was, and am, a fan of the movie with Stallone, and read the book back in 85, after Rambo II (groan) came out. How could I have known that the book would be so much better. As usual, the book always outdoes the movie. I've read it twice so far, and am beginning to feel it's almost time for number 3. I became a big Morrell fan after reading First Blood, having read about 10 of his books so far. I like his no-nonsense writing style and his fast-paced plotting, but none of his other books, in my opinion, have approached the great work he did on First Blood. Get Stallone out of your head and read the book.

The novel "First Blood" by David Morrel may be wrongly interpreted as just an "action/adventure" thriller without a brain, but that's far from the truth. The book does contains some elements of the adventure genre, but it presents us with a much bigger vison of life than just that. It is about Intolerance and justice.

John Rambo, a vagant war veteran, is mistreated by a bunch of redneck cops in a small town in the US. Submitted to humiliation and torture, and being traumatized by the months (years?) he spent under torture by the vietnamese, the ex-green beret and war hero loses control, explodes in fury and hatred and fights back, starting a killing spree.

He hides in the woods, builds traps, he uses the elements of the nature against his pursuiters.

The climax hits when both him and his enemies are thrown in the woods, his element, were they have to play by his rules, and the animal within each one of them takes control.

Then, violence erupts.

The novel is very real and down-to-earth. It is quite different from the movie. It is not heroic at all. It is about being different and being thrown aside, it is about the indiference, hate and coldness that the United States gave to their war veterans. It is about intolerance and fear. It is about how the government destroyed the sanity of some kids to build killing machines out of them, and sent those killing machines to southeast Asia to a war they could not understand, didn't want to and, mainly, didn't HAVE to. To kill better.

It is about how, when those kids came back home confused and tortured by the atrocities they had seen/commited, their country threw them in the gutter, pretending that they weren't there. Disposable heroes.

It is not at all about madly killing faceless enemies, big guns and, explosions, and giant-brested babes waiting to be rescued. It is not about making toys and animated series for kids. It is about reality. Forget the movie adaptations, forget the distorted, pleasent and idiotic vison that Hollywood wants the world to have. The real thing is here. Read it.

I had gotten into a pattern of reading the books that were the inspiration for some of my favorite movies. This was the second book that I read while in that mindset. I was very excited when I first started this book because it was very similar to the movie. Eventually however that trend began to change. Instead of having Rambo as the main character the book focusses more on Wilfred Teasle, the small town sheriff. Due to this drastic change in the main character the reader sympathizes much more with Teasle and his personal problem than with Rambo. Rambo in the book comes off as more of a lunatic continually having to prove his war abilities by killing innocent people. The ending is very different from the movie as well, but I will not get into that here, since I unfortunately had it ruined for me by another review here.

Anyways to sum up: This is a good book and a good read. It isn't as fast pace as the movie which was somewhat dissapointing but it does present the characters in a different way and gives one a different perspective on the whole ordeal. I would reccomend this to both people who have seen and like the movie, as well as to those who have seen the movie but thought that it was a bit too cheesy. This definitely has more emotions to it than the movie did.

You know this is going to be very different from the movie when the first paragraph describes Rambo as "a skinny kid with a long beard." If the movie of First Blood had been a faithful adaptation we'd possibly have a film masterpiece of action and the philosophy of violence in the style of Akira Kurosawa instead of the symbol of 1980's jingoism that Rambo has become a household name for. This is one mean book that seems to have been written while Morrell was on an adrenaline high. Morrell forsakes the usual conventions of thriller novels by abandoning the typical romantic interest and even clearly defined heros and villains and leaves us with a story that is simpler but much more riveting. We have two characters, Rambo and Teasle, neither particularly "good guys" but not really "bad guys" either. One is a fat conservitive on the side of law and order and the other is a poor, grungy fellow who just wants to be left to his own business. Both of these characters are too prideful to give an inch and the result of their pride is massive bloodshed, could this be a parable to the Vietnam war? Maybe, but more importantly its a rough, tough, superbly intense thriller that will keep you on the edge of the seat from start to finish. By all means check it out.

The book "First Blood" was very interesting and enjoyable to read. It had a classic conflict of man vs. man. It also made the reader think about what it was really like for the Viet Nam veterans when they returned to the United States. Many of them faced hostility from civilians at the airports calling them "baby-killers," and "murderers." This book was also fun to read because it had lots of action. Rambo destroyed a whole town. He used his knowledge from Green Beret training, and he used his sense's that he achieved from spending time in the war. This book also proved that once you become something, it will always be with you. You can't go back. In Rambo's case, he will always be a killer. No matter what he does, it will never leave him because it was what he was trained to do. In conclusion I recommend this book to any reader out there looking for an exciting, action-packed book that also deals with the history and conflicts of our United States.

I have read several of Morrell's books before and I must say, he is a mixed bag author. I either absolutely love his books ("Fraternity of the Stone," and "Brotherhood of the Rose", or I absolutely abhor them ("Scavenger," for one). "First Blood" is the first book I've read by Morrell that I found somewhere in the middle. I didn't despise reading it, and I enjoyed it for the most part, but it wasn't the exceptional quality I had come to expect out of Rambo (or John Rambo, to which it later evolves).

Unfortunately, I am just now reading this book, some thirty plus years after it originally debuted. I think, being a child born somewhere between Generation X and the Mellinial Generation, I was raised already knowing how incredible Rambo was and always expected high octane, high caliber, and emotionally charged stories.

I really liked Rambo, the character, at the beginning of the story. I was hoping for some more development and background on him, though. Maybe some more detailed flashbacks, more information from his superior officer, maybe... something! This story was a non stop chase throughout the Kentucky wilderness, of which I grew as fatigued in reading about Rambo and Teasle as those characters did chasing each other.

You can tell this is a first book by an author. It is hard to describe, but there just isn't the polish that I had come to appreciate of his later works (as expected) like "Brotherhood of the Rose," and "Fraternity of the Stone."

This book is highly recommended - no, required reading - for any Rambo or Morrell fans. Knowing the origin (of both) is like revisiting an old friend: Timeless.

J.Stoner