Rating: 
Summary: a slow begining but it gets better as it goes on
Review: This book is a little harder to follow than How Few Remain because there are more characters. The story is very hard to follow the first hundred to hundred-fifty pages. In How Few Remain many of the characters were real and famous people. This makes the story easier to follow. Unfortuantly the only actual person that has a large part in this book is Custer. In my opinion this book doesn't let you choose sides. Just as you might start feeling sorry, or rooting for one of the sides, Turtledove starts telling the story from the other sides point of view. This book shows how horrible war really is.
Rating:
Summary: Well worth reading, but room for improvement.
Review: I found "How Few Remain" Turtledove's best book: "Guns of the South" and "WorldWar" were both too contrived. In contrast, this series has a far more plausible premise. This book creates a fascinating world in which the South struggles with race relations, the North with industrial relations, and the United States has been drawn into precisely those entangling alliances against which George Washington warned, with precisely the consequences (and even worse ones) that GW predicted. As usual with Turtledove, the plot is rich and engrossing.The troubles with this book are few, but I hope he addresses them in the sequels: (1) As usual with Turtledove, there are too many sub-plots to keep track of. (2) On the other hand, I had invested a lot in the characters from "How Few Remain." Yet, how few of them remain! Few of them show up here. In particular, Teddy Roosevelt is missing in action. What happened to Lincoln (obviously dead, but where is his legacy?) and his children? What happened to Ben Butler and the other Republican leaders? How about Stonewall? Bring these guys--or their kids--back! (3) The war makes no sense. We have no idea of the war aims of the USA or CSA. The Great War may have been utter folly, but all the combatants had clear war aims. France's was the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine and national honor; Germany's was hegemonic and imperialistic; Russia's was control of the Balkans and the Dardanelles; etc... Why are the USA and CSA fighting? Surely the answer can't be that they just got dragged into the war by their allies? What do they hope to accomplish? Does the USA believe it can achieve reunification by force? What does the CSA hope to do? Turtledove doesn't tell us. The war also makes no strategic sense. Trench warfare dominated WWI because the parties were fighting over a relatively short front. With no room to maneuver, the power of artillery, mortars, machine guns, and barbed wire made trench warfare essential. In turn, the vast conscript ar! mies of the major powers provided enough manpower to man the trenches. But where manpower was limited and there was room to maneuver, trench warefare didn't happen. The East African and Arabian campaigns are good examples of this phenomenon. The USA and CSA have a much larger front to defend, with considerable open spaces. There is no reason for them to get bogged down in trench warfare--or at least not as quickly as takes place in the book. They had room to maneuver and should have done so. I also don't understand the USA's strategy, in particular. Two-front wars are not a good idea. But the USA is committed to fighting one. And why is the USA bogged down in trench warfare on the northeastern front? The way to beat the CSA is obvious: control the Mississippi. A combined amphibious and foot campaign along the West bank of the Mississippi, perhaps coupled with an amphibious strike at New Orleans. Cut the CSA in half. Strike overland at Atlanta, just as Sherman did. Virginia then falls of starvation. War won. Why aren't they trying this? (4) No big picture. I wish Turtledove would scrap one or two of the sub-plots and create one that gives us the big picture. He did this in "How Few Remain" with Sam Clemens' new stories. It was an obvious and slightly hackneyed plot contrivance, but it worked. Here he could easily bring Teddy Roosevelt into the plot and give us the big picture by means of Presidential briefings. Anyway, despite the problems, I vastly enjoyed this book and eagerly await sequels.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, but a work in progress
Review: It becomes obvious towards the end of The Great War: American Front, that all the loose ends are not going to be tied up. I am pleased, because it whets my appetite for the succeeding volumes in this alternate history. Turtledove is not creating a utopia here, this world in which the South defeated the North in the 1860s and again in the 1880s is a much poorer and more dangerous world than our own. Nor is this a story of good vs evil. Both sides commit brutalities as a matter of course, and there is no high flown rhetoric about saving democracy or ending war forever. This World War I is openly about aggression and power. I await the succeeding volumes breathlessly.
Rating:
Summary: Turtledove knows history... and people.
Review: I've long been an admirer of Harry Turtledove's work, and GREAT WAR: AMERICAN FRONT does not disappoint. It combines a fascinating what-if -- a divided America drawn into the European alliance system, and hence Europeanized -- with an epic scope suitable to the Great War, the war which launched the modern era. Yet it also keeps us focused on the _human_ aspect of the titanic struggle, and we see the war, its horrors and the social change it unleashes from the viewpoints of very real, very human characters. Besides that, it's a ripping good read! Go ye forth and buy it.
Rating:
Summary: Kept me reading!!
Review: I know most people have said that this wasn't his best book, but I found it thoroughly enjoyable. It was not as good as Guns of the South but that novel is just so great that you can't count that as a criticism. In any case, I enjoyed the speculative commentary on race relations in both sections of the nation. I was especially intrigued by the characters of Cincinnatus and Scipio. There were some characters that could have been deleted (Semphroch, Sam Carsten, among others) but this didn't really take away from the story. I definitely recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book, but not his best.
Review: It's hypocritical for me to simultaneously rush out to buy every Turtledove book (in hardcover yet) when it comes out, and to also suggest that he's spread too thin writing too many books, but I think that's the case. "American Front" is an excellent book, one that would do credit to most any writer, but it's not up to Turtledove's high standards. (Note to Publishers: pay him more money so he can spend more time on each book.) This said, I enjoyed the book and read it straight through. It's a first-rate book; it's just that I know he could do better.
Rating:
Summary: Not his best, but definitely an enjoyable read
Review: My first taste of Harry Turtledove was "Worldwar: In the Balance", so I've come to expect a lot from him. This book (And in fact, "How Few Remain" as well) aren't quite as good as his "Worldwar" series, but it was nevertheless enjoyable. Parts of the book DID get somewhat tedious--mostly during the winter months when the fronts stalled completely and there was relatively little action--but for a history buff such as myself, the book was satisfying overall. Perhaps the best way of describing my reaction to it is simply this: I will be buying the hardcover version of the next book in the series as soon as it's available.
Rating: 
Summary: Sadly, I found it slow going
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed Harry Turtledove's earlier Civil War era novels (even though I'm a rock-ribbed Yankee!) and his Worldwar alternative history. I was therefore rather disappointed to see that he seems to have run out of steam early in this cycle. Life in the trenches, both in our WW I and in Turtledove's alternative universe, was brutish, nasty and short, but how many malodorous craters do his characters have to fall into to make that point! His historical figures are much less carefully evolved than in previous works (his Custer in particular is a caricature) and many of the promising figures from How Few Remain don't appear in this book. C. S. Forester (The General and Randall and the River of Time, both sadly out of print) and Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front) do a far better job of evoking both the mentality of the high command and life in the trenches during the great War. I never thought I would say this about a Turtledove book, but this was heavy going!
Rating: 
Summary: A great idea, but Turtledove seems bored with his style.
Review: I really enjoyed How Few Remain, even if it pains me to even think about a Southern victory in the Civil War.(But I enjoyed the relationship between Longstreet and Jackson, he really captured their personalities.) Here Turtledove seems to lose interest in his characters and in the story itself about 150 pages in. There a few interesting characters on both sides, but no one you can really 'root' for to survive and win. That said, I can't wait to see how he writes himself out of the complexities he has created in this volume. But, as a previous reviewer has stated, I will wait for the paperback.
Rating:
Summary: Far below Turtledove's previous standard
Review: World War I style trench warfare alternated horrifying danger with stupifying boredom, all in squalid living conditions. Unfortunately, the first book in Turtledove's new great war series is just boring. The interweaving of plausibly developed historical figures with fictional characters which was such a delightful part of his Worldwar series and his two Civil War books is mostly absent and he doesn't juggle the multiple plotlines as adeptly as in prior works. Sadly, the book reads like a plodding pot-boiler. Hope springs eternal, so I'll probably finish reading the series.....but I'll wait for the paperback version for the next volume!
|
