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A review by jalumbaugh
Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice by Adam Makos
tense
slow-paced
2.0
The book was entertaining enough as it went on. Well enough written, if not clinical every time somebody felt a human emotion. "She cried" often being the most we get.
But, through the whole experience of reading it, I couldn't see past the nationalism I was supposed to buy into. For a book that wants to tell the most authentic war story, it can't help but write the enemy in the simplest action movie terms. The war is justified to the characters because the enemy is Communist and therefore needs to be stopped at every turn. We are supposed to weep at every American death but thousands of Chinese soldiers are mowed down without care.
The "friendship" at the core of the book is also hard to buy. Jesse and Tom barely talk, they're just in the same squadron sometimes!
Overall, messy and tries too hard to sell itself as interesting and historically accurate, while failing at both. A historically accurate book with any guts would write this war as a waste of human life, a civil war that was turned into a meat grinder by two empires worlds away.
But, through the whole experience of reading it, I couldn't see past the nationalism I was supposed to buy into. For a book that wants to tell the most authentic war story, it can't help but write the enemy in the simplest action movie terms. The war is justified to the characters because the enemy is Communist and therefore needs to be stopped at every turn. We are supposed to weep at every American death but thousands of Chinese soldiers are mowed down without care.
The "friendship" at the core of the book is also hard to buy. Jesse and Tom barely talk, they're just in the same squadron sometimes!
Overall, messy and tries too hard to sell itself as interesting and historically accurate, while failing at both. A historically accurate book with any guts would write this war as a waste of human life, a civil war that was turned into a meat grinder by two empires worlds away.