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cmbohn's review against another edition
2.0
DNF. This one was a disappointment. The historical detail was fascinating stuff, but the main character --whew! Amazing shot, great fighter, keen tactician, loved by his soldiers, respected by officers, desired by women, self made despite childhood trauma. All the good guys love him, even Lord Wellington himself, and only the incompetent buffoons despise him. This is pure wish fulfillment. I couldn't read another chapter and even took two other Bernard Cornwell books off my TBR.
herondaleducks's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
icarusabides's review against another edition
3.5
Bloody Simmerson, a loathsome figure in the show and a truly despicable one in the book but there's no doubting Cornwell's skill in drawing the character so well. Lt Col Sir Henry Simmerson to give him his proper name is the man who raised the South Essex regiment using his own money to fulfill his dreams of being brought glory by the shining red coats and gleaming gear of his very own real life toy army. An incompetent commander obsessed with flogging his own men to achieve perfection who is very quickly out of his depth as an avoidable blunder during a routine mission to destroy a bridge leads to the loss of the King's colour.
It soon falls to Sharpe to restore the pride of the South Essex in his new role as commander of the Light Company, all the while finding a way to avoid being scapegoated by the odious Simmerson as the army marches into Spain to face off against a formidable French force.
Every ounce of Sharpe's motivational skills are needed as he battles to turn the very green troops of the South Essex Light Company, formerly a local militia group, into a proper fighting force capable of standing in line against the best land army Europe has seen. A task made no easier by mounting tension throughout the battalion as Simmerson's leadership and punishment doctrine continues to cause division across the board.
There are some very good set pieces throughout Sharpe's Eagle, the chaos of the rout at the bridge and Sharpe rallying the remaining companies is great but the battle outside Talavera between the combined armies of England and Spain against the French is Cornwell at his absolute best. It's a battle told primarily through the front line skirmishing of Sharpe and his light company but Cornwell always makes the overall action of the day clear as columns of French troops march on the entrenched army of Wellesley. Sharpe's perspective provides a wonderfully clear and vivid into skirmishing tactics during such a battle with the light company engaging the French Voltigeurs between the lines of the two massed forces.
Sharpe as a character is at some of his absolute best in this book. He's formidable and heroic throughout and despite a tinge of melancholy early on he's probably at his happiest point to date in the series here. The sullen Sharpe of Rifles and Havoc is more or less gone and instead the determined tactically adept officer with a flair for inspirational leadership comes to the fore. Of course there's the usual undone by a beautiful woman plot line that this series cannot unfortunately do without but that aside it's a very good read.
It soon falls to Sharpe to restore the pride of the South Essex in his new role as commander of the Light Company, all the while finding a way to avoid being scapegoated by the odious Simmerson as the army marches into Spain to face off against a formidable French force.
Every ounce of Sharpe's motivational skills are needed as he battles to turn the very green troops of the South Essex Light Company, formerly a local militia group, into a proper fighting force capable of standing in line against the best land army Europe has seen. A task made no easier by mounting tension throughout the battalion as Simmerson's leadership and punishment doctrine continues to cause division across the board.
There are some very good set pieces throughout Sharpe's Eagle, the chaos of the rout at the bridge and Sharpe rallying the remaining companies is great but the battle outside Talavera between the combined armies of England and Spain against the French is Cornwell at his absolute best. It's a battle told primarily through the front line skirmishing of Sharpe and his light company but Cornwell always makes the overall action of the day clear as columns of French troops march on the entrenched army of Wellesley. Sharpe's perspective provides a wonderfully clear and vivid into skirmishing tactics during such a battle with the light company engaging the French Voltigeurs between the lines of the two massed forces.
Sharpe as a character is at some of his absolute best in this book. He's formidable and heroic throughout and despite a tinge of melancholy early on he's probably at his happiest point to date in the series here. The sullen Sharpe of Rifles and Havoc is more or less gone and instead the determined tactically adept officer with a flair for inspirational leadership comes to the fore. Of course there's the usual undone by a beautiful woman plot line that this series cannot unfortunately do without but that aside it's a very good read.
tome15's review against another edition
5.0
Cornwell, Bernard. Sharpe’s Eagle. 1981. Sharpe No. 8. Signet, 2004.
This book details one of the major events in rifleman Richard Sharpe’s career. Set in the Talavera campaign of 1809, during Sir Arthur Wellesley’s invasion of Spain, we see Sharpe humiliated when his regimental colors are lost by an incompetent officer who has replaced him because he has higher family connections than the orphaned slum-boy Richard Sharpe. So, Sharpe does what the title makes you expect, he gets even by capturing the French equivalent, an eagle on a pole. As always, Cornwell writes good action scenes, and is honest in an appendix about the liberties he has taken with history.
This book details one of the major events in rifleman Richard Sharpe’s career. Set in the Talavera campaign of 1809, during Sir Arthur Wellesley’s invasion of Spain, we see Sharpe humiliated when his regimental colors are lost by an incompetent officer who has replaced him because he has higher family connections than the orphaned slum-boy Richard Sharpe. So, Sharpe does what the title makes you expect, he gets even by capturing the French equivalent, an eagle on a pole. As always, Cornwell writes good action scenes, and is honest in an appendix about the liberties he has taken with history.
kateofmind's review against another edition
4.0
I don't often encounter historical/military novels that themselves have a strong sense of prior history the way that Sharpe's Eagle has, for the Roman Empire strongly permeates the book, especially in its opening chapters.
We open with Sharpe and his rifle company* being drafted into yet another weird little scheme. An ancient Roman bridge crossing the river Tagus, a bridge that has stood strong for hundreds of years, has to go for strategic reasons, and Sharpe's friend and sort-of-commander, Captain Hogan, is the engineer who's going to do it. All fine and dandy. But the mission comes with certain... accompaniments.
A right upper class twit of a politically connected jerk has raised a brand new regiment back home and dedicated them to the cause in Spain and Portugal, and they're coming along in all their finery and splendor. The upper class twit thinking that it's more important that his soldiers look well than fight well and all, it's a pretty useless regiment but one that, maybe with some seasoning, might do all right if their Colonel, one Sir Henry Simmerson, doesn't get them killed first. Anyway, they're coming along for the bridge blowing party.
But because this is Spain and everything here is a matter of hidalgo honor, so is a fancy Spanish regiment, even shinier and fancier and more useless than the British noobs. "Hell's teeth," one of Sharpe's men observes on the approach of these military fops. "The fairies are on our side."
So, the early mission turns out not to be so straightforward after all. And that's before the French show up. Which shouldn't be a problem, as it's obvious to Sharpe it's a classic calvary vs infantry standoff, wherein no one has sufficient advantage to make it worthwhile to attack. Alas, this is not so obvious to the Colonel or his Spanish counterpart, who, in a scene of prolonged hilarity, pretty much provoke the French into massacre. And lose the regimental colors (the physical embodiment of a regiment's honor and pride the way a Roman legion's eagle was back in the day, and what the French still use for this purpose ca the early 1800s, and now the title of this novel makes all the sense in the world, don't it?) into the bargain.
That's all prologue. It establishes a new enemy for Sharpe in Colonel Simmerson, who needs a scapegoat for his enormous blunder and finds Sir Arthur Wellesley's favorite gotten-up, up-from-the-ranks officer a perfect candidate as much because Sharpe is a protege of Wellesley's as because Sharpe disobeyed an order in the middle of the debacle that was essentially for him and his men to commit suicide and make the French win all the faster (instead, Sharpe rescued one of Simmerson's colors and captured a French cannon, because Sharpe is awesome). When Wellesley promotes Sharpe to Captain and gives him command of a Battalion of Detachments, consisting of odds-and-ends groups like Sharpe's own fragment of a rifle company, and puts the survivors of Simmerson's regiment in that new Battalion, he's just painted the biggest political bullseye ever on Sharpe's back, and Sharpe is, of course, the last guy who'd ever want to be entangled in any politics at all. Especially the kind that can result in his being yanked out of the Peninsular War and deployed to the West Indies, to likely die of a tropical disease within a year of his arrival!
But so there's only one thing Sharpe can do to redeem himself from the results of his badassery: something even more badass, something no one has managed to do in this war: capture a French Eagle.
And of course he'll have to do this in one of the Peninsular War's biggest battles.
With Simmerson and his underlings (including an odious nephew, who is, of course, fighting with Sharpe over, of course, a beautiful woman) in tow.
And even more useless Spaniards mucking things up. Seriously, the Spanish army does not come off well in this novel! When they're not cocking up minor actions being show-offs, they're delaying major actions by oversleeping and letting the French gather up even more forces. And then there's bits like this, describing the aftermath of an ill-planned bout of shooting at some out-of-range Frenchmen:
"For a second Sharpe thought the Spanish were cheering their own victory over the innocent grass but suddenly he realised the shouts were not of triumph, but of alarm. They had been scared witless by their own volley, by the thunder of ten thousand muskets, and now they ran for safety. Thousands streamed into the olive trees, throwing away muskets, trampling the fires in their panic, screaming for help, heads up, arms pumping, running from their own noise."
I bet Spanish readers hate this book.**
But I, I loved it. I'm in serious danger, folks, between this and my re-read of the Aubrey/Maturin books, of making this as much a Summer of Napoleonic War Stories as a Summer of Jest!
Though I do sometimes wish Sharpe would stop taking justice into his own hands. Dude has almost as much cold blood on them as hot. Not cool, Richard. Not cool. As it were. Um. Please don't hurt me.
*Now a seriously rag-tag bunch of military orphans, whose regiment is back in England and who therefore cannot get new uniforms or boots or gear of any kind, even from the plentiful other fighting recipients of the King's Shilling who are still on the Iberian Peninsula, because no one wants to take on the bureaucratic headaches that would ensue if Sharpe's boys were given kit out of some other regiment's or division's stores.
**But, as Cornwell informs us in his traditional historical afterword, that incident really happened.
We open with Sharpe and his rifle company* being drafted into yet another weird little scheme. An ancient Roman bridge crossing the river Tagus, a bridge that has stood strong for hundreds of years, has to go for strategic reasons, and Sharpe's friend and sort-of-commander, Captain Hogan, is the engineer who's going to do it. All fine and dandy. But the mission comes with certain... accompaniments.
A right upper class twit of a politically connected jerk has raised a brand new regiment back home and dedicated them to the cause in Spain and Portugal, and they're coming along in all their finery and splendor. The upper class twit thinking that it's more important that his soldiers look well than fight well and all, it's a pretty useless regiment but one that, maybe with some seasoning, might do all right if their Colonel, one Sir Henry Simmerson, doesn't get them killed first. Anyway, they're coming along for the bridge blowing party.
But because this is Spain and everything here is a matter of hidalgo honor, so is a fancy Spanish regiment, even shinier and fancier and more useless than the British noobs. "Hell's teeth," one of Sharpe's men observes on the approach of these military fops. "The fairies are on our side."
So, the early mission turns out not to be so straightforward after all. And that's before the French show up. Which shouldn't be a problem, as it's obvious to Sharpe it's a classic calvary vs infantry standoff, wherein no one has sufficient advantage to make it worthwhile to attack. Alas, this is not so obvious to the Colonel or his Spanish counterpart, who, in a scene of prolonged hilarity, pretty much provoke the French into massacre. And lose the regimental colors (the physical embodiment of a regiment's honor and pride the way a Roman legion's eagle was back in the day, and what the French still use for this purpose ca the early 1800s, and now the title of this novel makes all the sense in the world, don't it?) into the bargain.
That's all prologue. It establishes a new enemy for Sharpe in Colonel Simmerson, who needs a scapegoat for his enormous blunder and finds Sir Arthur Wellesley's favorite gotten-up, up-from-the-ranks officer a perfect candidate as much because Sharpe is a protege of Wellesley's as because Sharpe disobeyed an order in the middle of the debacle that was essentially for him and his men to commit suicide and make the French win all the faster (instead, Sharpe rescued one of Simmerson's colors and captured a French cannon, because Sharpe is awesome). When Wellesley promotes Sharpe to Captain and gives him command of a Battalion of Detachments, consisting of odds-and-ends groups like Sharpe's own fragment of a rifle company, and puts the survivors of Simmerson's regiment in that new Battalion, he's just painted the biggest political bullseye ever on Sharpe's back, and Sharpe is, of course, the last guy who'd ever want to be entangled in any politics at all. Especially the kind that can result in his being yanked out of the Peninsular War and deployed to the West Indies, to likely die of a tropical disease within a year of his arrival!
But so there's only one thing Sharpe can do to redeem himself from the results of his badassery: something even more badass, something no one has managed to do in this war: capture a French Eagle.
And of course he'll have to do this in one of the Peninsular War's biggest battles.
With Simmerson and his underlings (including an odious nephew, who is, of course, fighting with Sharpe over, of course, a beautiful woman) in tow.
And even more useless Spaniards mucking things up. Seriously, the Spanish army does not come off well in this novel! When they're not cocking up minor actions being show-offs, they're delaying major actions by oversleeping and letting the French gather up even more forces. And then there's bits like this, describing the aftermath of an ill-planned bout of shooting at some out-of-range Frenchmen:
"For a second Sharpe thought the Spanish were cheering their own victory over the innocent grass but suddenly he realised the shouts were not of triumph, but of alarm. They had been scared witless by their own volley, by the thunder of ten thousand muskets, and now they ran for safety. Thousands streamed into the olive trees, throwing away muskets, trampling the fires in their panic, screaming for help, heads up, arms pumping, running from their own noise."
I bet Spanish readers hate this book.**
But I, I loved it. I'm in serious danger, folks, between this and my re-read of the Aubrey/Maturin books, of making this as much a Summer of Napoleonic War Stories as a Summer of Jest!
Though I do sometimes wish Sharpe would stop taking justice into his own hands. Dude has almost as much cold blood on them as hot. Not cool, Richard. Not cool. As it were. Um. Please don't hurt me.
*Now a seriously rag-tag bunch of military orphans, whose regiment is back in England and who therefore cannot get new uniforms or boots or gear of any kind, even from the plentiful other fighting recipients of the King's Shilling who are still on the Iberian Peninsula, because no one wants to take on the bureaucratic headaches that would ensue if Sharpe's boys were given kit out of some other regiment's or division's stores.
**But, as Cornwell informs us in his traditional historical afterword, that incident really happened.
beejai's review against another edition
3.0
There is an implacable enemy, an incompetent superior officer, a beautiful damsel, and a looming battle. I am now eight books into the Sharpe's series and these four elements seem to be found in each and every one of them. In these books Bernard Cornwell plots the course of British military history from the battles of India all the way to Waterloo. In essence he is charting the military career of Duke Wellington, but each battle and each event is actually seen from the vantage of Richard Sharpe who started out a common soldier in His Majestey's army and has at this point risen to the rank of Captain. Although the plots are always similar and quite predictable, BC is an excellent writer of historical fiction and these books are always a fun read. You know the enemy will be defeated, the officer shamed, the girl loved then lost, and the battle won but how each of these things play out is worth the enjoyment of another page turner.
writerlibrarian's review against another edition
4.0
After almost 5 years and getting all the Sharpe's books I finally, finally found a way into the series. I've tried 3 times before (well actually 4 times) to start reading this series set in the Napoleonian Wars period featuring Richard Sharpe, professional soldier, great leader, romantic lead and all around action hero. I've tried reading chronologically (twice) starting with Sharpe's Tiger (set in India) didn't work, I found myself not "getting" the feel of the character like there was many many layers I should get and didn't.
I tried Sharpe's Rifles because it was the first movie made, with the wonderful Sean Bean, alas nope. Still not getting into a series I knew in my bones that I would enjoy. Time passed. This spring I found this wonderful group of Age of sail people and someone said they read them as they came out. I went... oh my god... that's brilliant. And it was.
It truly was.
So Sharpe's Eagle. I loved it. You get right into the heart of the action, the character's motivation, wants and needs, the way the army works and the way the war is being fought. How the Spanish and the French and the British are in a huge, huge mess. I liked the tactical warfare, how Cornwell gets into Sharpe's head and how I love Harper.
Afterward, I checked out the chapter on Sharpe's Eagle in The Sharpe Companion. I found some wonderful background information that put what had really happened and what didn't.
I tried Sharpe's Rifles because it was the first movie made, with the wonderful Sean Bean, alas nope. Still not getting into a series I knew in my bones that I would enjoy. Time passed. This spring I found this wonderful group of Age of sail people and someone said they read them as they came out. I went... oh my god... that's brilliant. And it was.
It truly was.
So Sharpe's Eagle. I loved it. You get right into the heart of the action, the character's motivation, wants and needs, the way the army works and the way the war is being fought. How the Spanish and the French and the British are in a huge, huge mess. I liked the tactical warfare, how Cornwell gets into Sharpe's head and how I love Harper.
Afterward, I checked out the chapter on Sharpe's Eagle in The Sharpe Companion. I found some wonderful background information that put what had really happened and what didn't.
elegantmechanic's review against another edition
3.0
Fairly enjoyable (read spontaneously when an inexplicable interest in the Napoleonic era swept over me). Chapters tend to feel very episodic with most feeling like a self-contained story which made it hard to care about what was next and therefore keep reading, but the last few dealing with the major battle have more momentum and I read 4 of them in a sitting. Never read Cornwell before and I don't know if his habit here of repeated character description is part of his style (I lost count of how many times he used the phrase "the tall rifleman" to describe Sharpe) but it was a bit grating. I also rolled my eyes at one character who existed only to be brutalised in order to give Sharpe motivation but that may have been a sign of the times (1981). Would try more of these but not in a hurry.
cbking's review against another edition
4.0
The usual fun from Cornwell. These books are just like historical romance novels: fast pacing and wonderful historical background, always with a HEA (happily ever after) ending.
loxleyhall's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Gore, Violence, Sexual violence, Sexual assault, and Rape