Band of Brothers Book vs the HBO Series: Which Do Veterans Prefer?

Ray had the DVD set before I ever opened the book. We watched the whole thing together in his living room over a handful of evenings, some years back now, and I came away thinking I knew the story. Then this spring I bought three paperback copies of Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose, read one myself over about three weeks in March, and handed the other two around the table. From April into June the four of us at Thursday coffee worked through it a chapter at a time. So when a wife at the post asks me which one to buy her husband, I am not comparing two things I have read about online. I have done both, and I have listened to three men who wore the uniform say which one they kept picking back up.

Here is the short answer, since that is what you came for. If you are buying one thing, buy the paperback. It is the one that lasts, it is the one that tells you who these men were before the war and what became of them after, and it is the one that gave four men at a table three months of conversation. The series is the better first taste, and for some men it is the better fit. I will tell you exactly who in a minute.

For the record, this is not written from a product listing. I own the paperback, the Stephen E. Ambrose one, and I read it once on my own and then again with the group. I have also sat through Ray's DVD set with him twice. What follows is one table of four men and my own reading. It is not a survey of anybody.

	Band of Brothers (paperback)	HBO miniseries
Knowing who these men were before the war	Hometowns, jobs, families, what they left behind. That is the whole reason to read it.	The men arrive already in uniform and most of the before is left off the screen.
Understanding what a fight was like	You read it and you build the picture in your own head.	You see the ground, the weather and the faces. That is what film is for.
Keeping track of who is who	Dozens of names and no faces to hang them on. I flipped back more than once.	You learn the faces in the first hour and the names stick after that.
Finishing it	About three weeks for me, a few pages a night.	A handful of evenings, one episode at a time.
Taking it somewhere	It goes in the truck or in a bag, and it works in a waiting room.	It lives where the television lives and it stays there.
Going back to one moment	You find the chapter and read the same four pages again.	You find the episode and sit through what you did not want in order to reach the part you did.
Something to talk about at a table	This is what gave the four of us eight Thursdays of conversation.	Good for one evening of talk, and then it goes back on the shelf.
A gift for a man who does not want to revisit the war	It is still the war on every page.	It is still the war in every episode.

If you look down that table, the book takes four rows, the series takes three, and one is a tie. That is close to how it felt. Anybody who tells you one of these wipes out the other has not sat with both.

I bought three paperback copies instead of one, and that turned out to be the right call. One for me, and two to pass around, which is how the reading group started without anybody deciding to start one. If you are buying for a man at a post, buy two. He will want to hand one to somebody, and a book that gets handed on is a book that gets read twice.

Where the Book Wins

The first thing the book gives you is the part a camera cannot. Stephen E. Ambrose starts these men in their hometowns. He tells you what they did for a living before any of this, which of them had never been farther than the next county, and what they left behind when they went. By the time they are in France you know what they are carrying besides equipment. The opening stretch is training camps and small towns, and it runs longer than a man raised on television would expect it to. Ray put it as well as anybody could at coffee one Thursday. He said the series shows you what happened and the book tells you who it happened to. Dale said the training chapters were the part he would have skipped if he had known, and then admitted a week later that they were the part he kept thinking about.

The second thing is the after. The book does not stop where the shooting stops. It follows these men home, into jobs and marriages and the long quiet business of living another fifty years, and it lets you see what the rest of it looked like. That was the part the table argued about the longest. Hank went back and read those pages a second time. Dale said almost nothing that morning, which from Dale is a whole paragraph.

The third thing is that you can carry it. The edition I have is the Simon and Schuster paperback from 2001, 336 pages, 6.25 by 9.25 inches, about 1.2 pounds, and it goes in the door pocket of the truck or in a bag by the chair. I did most of my own reading at my kitchen table under the lamp, a few pages a night, and the book sat on the seat of the Buick on the days I had errands. Ray read his at the barber and in the truck outside the hardware store. You cannot do that with a DVD set. Whatever the series does better, it does it in one room of the house, and only when somebody feels like sitting down.

Fourth, it holds up to going back. When one of the men mentioned a place, we could find the chapter and read the same four pages out loud again. Dale came in one Thursday with a folded piece of paper and page numbers written on it. That is a thing you do with a book. With a disc you are hunting for an episode and then sitting through what you did not want in order to get to what you did.

Where the Series Wins

Now the other side, and I will not soften it. The series shows you faces. That sounds like a small thing and it is not. The book carries dozens of names, and a name on a page is a hard thing to hold on to when you are tired and reading in a chair at nine at night. I flipped back to check who somebody was more than once, and Hank said the same. The series puts a face on a man in the first hour, and after that you know exactly who just walked into the room. We had one Thursday where Dale spent ten minutes convinced that two of the men in the book were the same man. Hank set him straight. That confusion happens in the book. It does not happen with the series, because the face is already in front of you.

It also shows you the ground. What a hedgerow looks like from a ditch. What the weather was doing. How fast things actually happen. Reading about a fight and watching one staged are two different kinds of knowing, and for a man who wants to understand what it was like, the picture does something the page cannot. Dale, who does not hand out compliments, said the series got the small things right, the gear and the way men move.

And it is easier to finish. Three weeks for me on my own, eight more weeks with the group, against a handful of evenings on the couch. If you are buying for a man who reads a page and falls asleep, or for a man whose eyes are not what they were, the series asks less of him. The paperback print is small. At 74 Ray managed it, but he managed it with the lamp pulled over and his glasses on. The book is the better thing and the series is the easier thing, and those are not always the same purchase.

One more note about the series, and this is not a knock on it. It is a thing you watch with somebody. Ray and I did it over a handful of evenings with the television in his living room and the volume up, because his hearing is not what it was. You cannot do that with a book, and you would not want to. Some evenings that is exactly what a man wants.

What the Thursday Table Said

I want to be careful here, because four men at a table is not a survey and I will not dress it up as one. What I can tell you is what got said. Ray is Navy, 1970 to 1974, a machinist's mate, and he came at the book from a different direction than the rest of us. What he cared about was the training. He said the part about turning civilians into soldiers was the part he recognized, and that the series went over it too quick.

Dale was in the Corps in the 1980s and mostly wanted to argue, which is Dale. He would read a chapter, come in on Thursday with a complaint, and the four of us would spend forty minutes on it. Hank spent twenty years in the Air Force turning wrenches on aircraft. He read the whole thing quietly and then said the book made him think about the men he worked with, not the men in the book. That is about the highest thing you can say for a book. He read his copy with a pencil in his hand and never marked a page of it. When I told him to keep the copy, he said he would, and it is on his shelf now.

Not one of them said the series was better. All three said they were glad they had seen it first, because it gave them faces to hang the names on once they started reading. That is the order I would recommend to anybody buying both. Watch it, then read it. It works better that way, and it is the order we did it in without planning to.

The last Thursday in June, when we closed the back cover, nobody said much at first. Dale set his copy down on the folding table, folded his hands, and said he was glad it was over. He meant the book, I think, and he also meant the war inside it. Then he asked what we were reading next. From Dale, that is a compliment, and it is the reason I would buy this book for a man before I would buy him anything with a ribbon on it.

Three weeks reading it on my own, eight more weeks with the group, against a handful of evenings on the couch.

Who Should Buy Which

Buy the Stephen E. Ambrose paperback for the man who reads. Not the man who reads a great deal, just the man who reads. If there is a stack of books beside his chair, this goes on top of it. Buy it for the man who watched the series years ago and still brings it up, because the book gives him the part the cameras left out. And buy it for the quiet one who says a single thing at the end of an hour, because that man will finish it and then hand it to somebody else at the post.

Buy the series for a man who has never read a book about the war and has no plans to start. Buy it for a man whose eyes are giving him trouble, because 336 pages of paperback print is a real obstacle and I will not pretend otherwise. And buy it for yourself if you are the daughter or the grandson trying to understand what your father or grandfather is talking about, because it is the easier way in and there is no shame in the easier way in.

If you are buying for a veteran who has been plain with you that he does not want to go back over it, buy neither. That is a real thing and it is not a failure of the gift. I know a man who would not have either one in the house, and I did not push it with him. There are plenty of other things to put in a box for a man like that.