Stars and Stripes Triumphant [Import] [Hardcover]

Harry Harrison (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 249 pages
• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton (2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0340689218
• ISBN-13: 978-0340689219
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,810,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Fizzles out, March 12, 2003

By 

Jack Lifton (Birmingham, Mi USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stars and Stripes Triumphant (Hardcover)

If you can imagine a Great Britain in 1865 where the Queen's petulant childlike behavior dominates day-to-day politics, where the British Navy and Army are totally unaware of massive troop and ship movements from North America east accross the Atlantic, where the Imperial administration and Military in London are taken completely unaware by gasoline powered (Carnot) engines moving very very heavy armored guns and vehicles and these machines are coming off of immensely heavy iron warships then you are probably ready for John Ericsson and William Parrott to invent all of the parts of the gasoline engine powered tank (engine, transmission, axles, wheels, and FUEL! while they are at the same time building staem powered warships carrying massive mortars protected by solid iron armor. I'll bet the USA ran quite a budget deficit building this invasion fleet and supplying the troops. Did I mention that there are green ELECTRIC lights on the American warships?

Add to this wooden characterizations of Sherman, Grant, Lincoln, Fox, Palmerston, Russell, and Disraeli and you have a novel that just fizzles out with America bringing "Democracy" to Great Britain.

The Irish in the story are brutally mistreated and the non-titled English are either crude or cowardly. All Americans of course are just great guys who only want to right the wrongs of the world.

I suppose that editors don't question the story telling ability of long established authors, but why was this one published?

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars An Anglophobe's wet-dream: a polemical review, April 20, 2003

By 

Dr Garry (Annandale, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stars and Stripes Triumphant (Hardcover)

I have read and enjoyed Mr Harrison's SF for nigh on thirty years. "Deathworld" took me through adolescence. The "Stainless Steel Rat" through youth, and the increasingly Carry-On style of the "Bill, the Galactic Hero" series even further.

But I just cannot stomach this triumvirate. The writing is wooden, but what irks me is the scenario and the politics. Please feel free to stop reading now if you are simply looking for a read.

As an Aussie, I consider myself neither Anglo-, not Amero, -phobic or -philliac.

Previous reviewers have mentioned the technological problems, and Mr Harrison's general presumption that all Americans are combinations of Rambo and Thomas Edison, whereas all Brits are like the guys from "Dumb and Dumber".

I am surprised that no one has mentioned Mr Harrison's presumptions that:

* Forty years (I'm no American scholar.. correct me if I'm wrong) of the deepest tensions and social schisms in the USA concerning slavery suddenly vaporise instantly when a few Brits get off course;

* An American invasion of Ireland suddenly reconciles 800 years of Protestant-Catholic discord and hatred;

* Americans bring democracy to the UK. In the late 1860s, American senators were no more elected than the House of Lords and the aristocracy Mr Harrison professes to despise: senators where chosen by state legislatures.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A few more negatives about this book, January 14, 2008

By 

Peter Hobson (Groton, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stars and Stripes Triumphant (Hardcover)

Some of the previous reviews have pointed out some serious problems with Stars & Stripes Triumphant. I just finished reading it, and I noted some more discrepancies.

Count Iggy could not have gone to the Royal Naval College Greenwich before the Crimean War, since it wasn't established until 1873. Moreover, it was not a place for training officer candidates (that was done at the Royal Naval College Dartmouth, started in 1863). The courses taught at Greenwich were for mid to upper-grade officers, lieutenant commanders and above.

The river running through Cork is not the River Lee but the River Lea.

Ulysses S. Grant was known to his contemporaries as "Sam."

In the 1860s there were two battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, not 25. Only during the massive expansion of the British Army during the First and Second World Wars did certain regiments grow anywhere near that large.