Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose: An Honest Review

The first thing you should know is that this book is not the miniseries. My brother Ray owns the DVD set, and we watched all ten parts together on his couch some years back, and I walked away thinking I knew the story. Then I bought the paperback in March, read it over about three weeks, and somewhere in the first fifty pages I understood I had been watching a highlight reel and calling it a history. Stephen E. Ambrose wrote 336 pages about Easy Company of the 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from their training through Normandy to the Eagle's Nest. That is the shape of the thing. But the honest review you are after is not about the shape. It is about whether a 68-year-old man in reading glasses, and three veterans at a Thursday coffee table, would actually finish it. We did. In June.

I bought three paperback copies, not one. That was the plan from the start. Ray is 74 and did four years in the Navy as a machinist's mate. Dale was a Marine in the 1980s. Hank put in twenty years in the Air Force as an aircraft mechanic. I am none of those things. I am the civilian who makes the coffee and sets up the chairs at the post on Thursday mornings, and I have spent enough years shopping for these men to know that a book is only a gift if somebody actually opens it. So I read my copy first, alone, before I set the other two on the table.

How Three Copies Ended Up on the Thursday Table

It was never a book club. I want to be clear about that, because the word makes people picture sign-up sheets and assigned chapters and somebody getting sore about it. This was four men at a table that already existed. Thursday morning, nine o'clock, the post hall, coffee I made myself. We started in April and finished in June, and it added maybe forty minutes to a morning that already ran long. Nobody was graded on it.

What made it work was the mix. Ray and I had both seen the series, so we came in with opinions already formed. Dale had never touched either version. Hank reads history on his own but had not read this one. One man who knew the screen version, one who knew nothing, one who reads history anyway, and one civilian who bought the books. If you are trying to guess whether this lands with a particular veteran, that spread is more useful than any single opinion I could give you.

I handed the copies over at the table in March, one at a time, and I did not make a speech about it. Ray looked at the cover and said he had seen the show. Dale asked whether it was a novel. Hank opened it to the middle and read a paragraph out loud, which is what Hank does. That was the entire presentation.

Here is the practical part. Nothing about this book needs a group. Ray read his in bed, a chapter at a time. Dale read his in the garage with the door up. The Thursday talk was a bonus and not a requirement, and I would not want you to think you have to organize anything for the gift to work. Three men, three copies, three different ways of getting through it.

What the Book Does That the Series Cannot

The series shows you the winter. The book tells you who was standing next to whom, what a man did for a living before the Army took him, and which of them came home and went back to a job that never mentioned any of it. That accumulation is the point. Training camp, the drop into Normandy, the fighting in between, and the walk to the Eagle's Nest, all at a pace that lets you feel how long the war actually was for these men.

Dick Winters is the spine of it. If you have seen the series you already know his name, and the book gives you more of him rather than less. What surprised me is how much of the story belongs to men whose names I never held onto from the screen. The book keeps them. That is the difference between a dramatization and a history, and Stephen E. Ambrose wrote the history.

It also reads like a story. I had braced for something dry, the way a service history can be dry, and it is not that. Ambrose moves. He does not stop to explain the war to you, which means you have to keep up, and keeping up is what makes it feel like it is happening rather than being summarized.

What I did not expect was that I would go back into it. I finished my copy in March, and then through April and May I was picking it up again to check something one of the others had said at the table. A book you read once is a different purchase than a book you keep pulling off the shelf to settle an argument. This one has come off the shelf a good many times since June.

What Nobody Tells You: The Names

Here is what I would want somebody to tell me before I started. This book has a great many men in it, and they arrive fast. You will meet a lieutenant, a sergeant, a replacement, and a man from another company inside two pages, and several of them will carry the same kind of name. I read the first stretch with a pencil in hand, marking who was who in the margin. I am not embarrassed about it. It is what the book asks of you.

Dale put it better than I could. He said it was like being handed a shop roster on your first day and expected to know everybody by lunch. He kept reading anyway, because the story pulls you along even when the names blur into each other. But if the person you are buying for sets a book down the moment it gets confusing, this is the thing that will stop him, and no amount of praise from me will fix that.

There is a way around it. Read the first hundred pages slower than you want to. By the time the replacements start arriving you will know the core of them, and after that the book stops feeling crowded. Dale did not do this and he still finished. I did, and I finished more comfortably. That is the whole of my advice on the matter.

The other thing nobody mentions is how close the fighting sits. It is not gratuitous and it is not long-winded, but it is right there on the page, and there were chapters that took me two tries to get through. I read before bed and I had to put it down more than once. If you are buying for a man who served and does not care to spend his evenings back in it, that is not a fault in the book. It is the wrong gift, and there are other things on the table.

None of this is a reason to skip the book. It is a reason to know what you are handing over. A man who finishes it will tell you it was worth it. A man who stops at page sixty will tell you it was a chore, and both of them will be telling the truth.

Dale came in cold, having never seen the series, and said he was glad he read it and would not read it again. From Dale, that is high praise.

The Print, the Size, and Other Practical Matters

This is the Simon and Schuster paperback. 336 pages, 6.25 by 9.25 inches, 1.2 pounds, in this edition since 2001. That size matters more than you would think. It is not a pocket book, so the page is roomy, but the type is not large. Hank read his with a pair of cheaters from the drugstore and never complained. Ray, who is 74 and stubborn about glasses, complained twice and kept going, which is Ray.

1.2 pounds is light enough to hold up in bed. That sounds like nothing until you have watched a man with sore hands try to prop a hardcover history on his chest. It also travels. Dale carried his to a waiting room and finished a chapter before they called his name.

There is also the matter of where it gets read. Ray reads in a recliner with the lamp over his shoulder, and the paperback sits open on his knee without fighting him. A bigger, heavier book would have wanted two hands and a table. That is a small thing that decides whether a book gets finished in a house like his.

The object itself is plain. Paper, glue, a spine, a cover. Nobody is going to set this on a shelf to be admired. It is a book you read and then hand to somebody else, which is exactly what happened to these three copies. If you want a gift that looks like something the moment the paper comes off, this is not that, and I would rather tell you now.

One more practical note. This book does not need a shelf. Mine has lived on the end table in the living room since March, and Ray keeps his on the arm of the couch where he can reach it. It is the sort of object that ends up wherever the reader sits, which is a compliment even if it does not sound like one.

What the Four of Us Said, and What That Is Worth

I want to be careful here. I have read enough of these pages to know how easy it is to turn one table of four men into a survey of the whole service. It is not that. It is one Marine, one Air Force mechanic, one Navy machinist's mate, and one civilian, in one hall, in one town in Wisconsin, and that is all the weight it carries.

Ray thought the series told the winter better and the book told the men better, and he has not changed his mind since June. Dale, who came in cold, said he was glad he read it and would not read it again, which from Dale is high praise. Hank, who reads history anyway, wanted more on the units on either side of them. I wanted to keep the names straight, and I did it with a pencil in the margin, and I would do it the same way again.

The listing shows 783 ratings at 4.8 out of 5 as I write this. I do not put much stock in a number on its own. I put stock in three men who did not have to finish it, finishing it, and then arguing about it at nine in the morning for three months.

Four men finishing a book is not proof of anything. But it is what I have, and I would rather hand you that than a sales pitch dressed up as a review.

Who This Is For

This is for the veteran who wants the whole account and not the screen version, and who does not mind carrying a roster of names in his head for a few weeks. It suits a man who already reads history, and it suits a man who does not, as long as he has the patience to get through the crowded opening. Stephen E. Ambrose wrote it to be read rather than studied, and that shows in how it moves.

It is also a good gift for the family member who wants to understand what the man at the table actually did, without asking him to explain it. I am the civilian in this story and that was my reason. Reading it gave me a way to follow the Thursday conversation instead of sitting at the end of it. If you are the wife, the daughter, the son, or the friend who wants in on that, this is the book I would hand you.

If you are buying for the post rather than for one man, the paperback is the sane choice. Three copies went around four men without anyone worrying about keeping them clean, and a book that gets handled is a better gift than one that gets protected.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if the person you are buying for does not read and would rather watch the series again. That is not a slight. The series is very good, and a man who spent his evenings in a war is allowed to want the version with a soundtrack and an ending in ten hours rather than a month.

Skip it if small print is a real barrier. The paperback is not large type, and no amount of affection for the subject will make it easier to see. And skip it if he has told you plainly that he does not want to revisit that war in his spare time. He has earned the right to say so, and a book that sits unopened is not a gift, it is a reminder of a conversation you should not have pushed.