Jamie’s Rating    

A company of American soldiers faces combat in Vietnam, overcoming the rabages of war and the mistakes of a general who is more concerned with his own ego that with the lives of the men under his command.

An incredible publishing story--written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, a New York Times best seller for sixteen weeks, a National Indie Next and a USA Today best seller-- Matterhorn has been hailed as a "brilliant account of war" ( New York Times Book Review). Now out in paperback, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

Matterhorn is a visceral and spellbinding novel about what it is like to be a young man at war. It is an unforgettable novel that transforms the tragedy of Vietnam into a powerful and universal story of courage, camaraderie, and sacrifice: a parable not only of the war in Vietnam but of all war, and a testament to the redemptive power of literature.

This is a powerful, brilliant and greatly moving novel, deeply significant and deeply within the American grain? Marlantes has masterfully rendered, on a human scale and an epic scale, the archetype of war and the way its machinery, in Vietnam, mirrors American society as a whole, in particular the central American issues of race and class. ~ John This is a magnificent novel, more a coming of age story and exposition of the 60s than a battlefield epic? The more I reflect on this book and learn about its literary and mythical underpinnings, the more enthusiastic I become. It could be the Great American Novel. Read it! ~ Mary

“Every war has produced seminal fiction, but in the case of Vietnam there have been few examples. Marlantes now increases that list with a towering, majestic novel of men in combat. Like all great literature, his work transcends a particular war because of the universality of his characters and themes. This is a novel that will endure.”

     -Bill Cusumano, Nicola's Books, Ann Arbor, MI

Karl Marlantes grew up in a logging town on the Oregon coast, commercial fishing with his grandfather. He graduated from Yale University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, before serving as a Marine in Vietnam. He is the bestselling author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War. He lives in rural Washington.