Excellent. Intriguing information about WW2 stuff I was not aware of and set in the fictional town of his prior trilogy - so some old friends revisited. ( )

This book literally blew me away. It wasn't at all what I expected or anything like any books that I've read before. Ivan Doig wrote this book in 2008, and it's been sitting on my TBR shelf for at least 3 years. Only because I am making a conscious effort to read my books that I've had around for awhile, did I happen to land on this one. What a book this was! If you are not a fan of true to life WWII stories, and if you don't care to visit some key battles and sites from this war, or if you don't like graphic war scenes, you probably will not enjoy this book. This book of Ivan Doig's is the most gripping and emotional fiction I've ever read about WWII. It is all tied around an all-American university football team that was readying itself for the finals when Pearl Harbour was bombed. All eleven team members from Montana enlisted immediately. All elven team members were posted in different parts of the world to fight their own war. One, the team captain, Ben Reinking, finds himself being posted as a war correspondent chronicling the heroics and the lives of all the various members of his former team and where each is serving in the war. Ben is following in his father's footsteps as a journalist. His father owns and runs the local paper in Ben's hometown. Ben's assignment takes him to various well-known battlefields around the world such as Guam, Nome, Alaska, and Antwerp where the book comes to an end. Right from the very beginning of the story where we meet a young football hopeful by the name of Purcell, who would give is all for a chance to play on this dream team to the final pages in Antwerp and the Battle of the Bulge, where yet another teammate meets his end, I didn't dare breathe.. By the time, I shut the book, I had to take a deep breath and try to come back to reality. I really couldn't put this book down. It left me guessing and hanging right up until the very last two pages. And by the end of the book, only one of the famous and doomed Montana Eleven was left standing. Highly recommend! Fabulous book! It will go near the top of my special favourites list. ( )

Main character is pullled from the Air For e and is assigned a JR urnalsim job reporting on the other 10 members of his undefeated football team. They are deployed all over the world, but each is eventually killed serving the country. ( )

Interesting novel about WWII and female fighter pilots. I did not realize all that they did in the war. ( )

I really went back and forth on this one wondering what I really thought. The thing that really saved it from being just a three-star rating was when I reflected on his relationship with Cass Standish after reading it.

Mild spoilers may follow.....

The further our hero progresses in the story, the more cynical he becomes about the mission he has been called on to do--follow the story of his teammates from college football as they do their separate things in the War. The more he thinks about it, the more he feels abused by 'the system.' He is trying to put a cheery face on those who died in the war. At the same time, he is involved in an adulterous affair with the wife of a soldier fighting in the Pacific.

I haven't read Doig before, but I suspect he is smart enough to use the storyline of the affair to highlight Ben's hypocrisy. Ben feels like he is being used and almost feels guilty about being spared the dangerous jobs that many of his teammates have in the war. He seems to proudly claim that he doesn't wish any ill of his lover's husband as he fights in the Pacific war. What he never realizes, or certainly never admits, is that he is using Cass and is being just as cynical about her marriage as he perceives his 'handlers' in the army leadership and propaganda machine to be.

It is this disconnect and indictment of Ben that really made me respect this book after I reflected on it for a day or so. Ben was getting what he wanted from Cass--companionship and sex--without any real cost of relationship or sacrifice on his part. He resented that he was just a cog in the great propaganda wheel of the US Army--that he was being used, not honestly like a soldier being asked to take known risks--at least they know their part, and while dangerous, is at least honest--but spinning the truth to make the army and the war effort look good.

I think that at the end, the story was much more about this contrast than it was about the vagaries and odds of danger in the war. ( )