The Red Line
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3,5 • 2 beoordelingen
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- € 3,49
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- € 3,49
Beschrijving uitgever
WWIII explodes in this electrifying debut military thriller in the tradition of Red Storm Rising and The Third World War.
“Delta-Two, I’ve got tanks through the wire! They’re everywhere!”
World War III explodes in seconds when a resurgent Russian Empire launches a deadly armored thrust into the heart of Germany. With a powerful blizzard providing cover, Russian tanks thunder down the autobahns while undercover Spetsnaz teams strike at vulnerable command points.
Standing against them are the woefully undermanned American forces. What they lack in numbers they make up for in superior weapons and training. But before the sun rises they are on the run across a smoking battlefield crowded with corpses.
Any slim hope for victory rests with one unlikely hero. Army Staff Sergeant George O'Neill, a communications specialist, may be able to reestablish links that have been severed by hostile forces, but that will take time. While he works, it’s up to hundreds of individual American soldiers to hold back the enemy flood.
There’s one thing that’s certain. The thin line between victory and defeat is also the
red line between life and death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in the near future, Gragg's impeccably researched, riveting first novel pits a revived Soviet Union against NATO. Russia's brutal dictator, Comrade Cheninko, has built on a resurgence of power begun under Vladimir Putin and reconstituted the Warsaw Pact. A new cold war is about to become a hot one. Cheninko's top general, Valexi Yovanovich, has developed a brilliant plan to deceive the enemy and conquer Germany in a mere five days. An extensive cast of well-drawn men and women on both the American and Russian sides provides a personal dimension to the big-picture view of the clash of massive armies. Gragg, a Vietnam War veteran who served at the United States European Headquarters in Germany, gives readers a horrifying look at the devastation of modern warfare from the smallest, most painful details to the frighteningly plausible global scenarios that could result in the death and devastation of a significant portion of our planet. This is must reading for any military action fan. Nearly every page reeks of the smoke of battle and the stench of death.
Klantrecensies
A little too red...
In general I liked this book, but I have two major issues with it:
1. The way Walt Gragg plunges the Eastern European countries right back into the tentacles of a renewed Russian communist regime (and does not even take time to thoroughly describe that process) is simply too far-fetched to be believable. It almost seems like Mr. Gragg had originally wanted to publish this book during the Cold War, and got blindsided when it ended in '89 and Eastern Europe joined the EU and NATO. Today, it is unthinkable that those countries would rejoin a new Soviet Union without war breaking out right there and then, instead of when it happens in this story.
2. Mr. Gragg uses a cascade of adjectives in multiple sentences to state simple facts. In my writers class my teacher would say 'kill your darlings'. There's nothing wrong with using adjectives, but use them wisely and therefore scarcely. Now, the extended use of adjectives makes me feel like I'm reading a work of philosophy instead of a military thriller.
Apart from these two things, Walt Gragg managed to write a pretty good novel which describes the true horror and desperation of all-out war in a genuine way.