- Hardcover: 151 pages
- Publisher: Nautical & Aviation Pub Co of Amer; Reissue edition (February 1990)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0933852762
- ISBN-13: 978-0933852761
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.5 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 363 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,938,225 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
FIRST TO THE FIELD AND LAST OUT OF IT,
By
This review is from: Rifleman Dodd (Hardcover)
This is pure adventure and the at the same time an insight into the futility and reversals of war. Dodd is you typical early 19th cent. soldier. Can't read, can't write. What he can do is follow orders and do his best to create as much havoc and confusion as he can. He is one man against an army. To survive and rejoin his regiment he must out wit, out run and out shoot the enemy. I can see why this book was choosen as part of the Marine Corp Comandant's reading list. The story embodies all the things a good soldier should be. I can also see were Bernard Cornwell got his inspiration for another Rifleman of the 95th. Dodd exsemplifies the things that all good men should be. Regardless if they wear an uniform or not.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cornwell's inspiration,
By
This review is from: Rifleman Dodd (Hardcover)
Just thought I'd add that Bernard Cornwell cites this book as his favorite Forester and the inspiration for his Sharpe novels, also about a British Rifleman, mainly in Spain 1809-1815. As a matter of fact, Dodd appears as a minor character under Sharpe's command in, I think, SHARPE'S RIFLES. It's been at least a decade since I last read this book, so I don't recall all the details. But my memory is that Dodd is just a shade TOO heroic. On the other hand, he's an excellent illustration of Forester's recurring theme of the way overlooked individuals can change the course of history. (My personal favorites on this theme by Forester: THE GUN and BROWN ON RESOLUTION, aka SINGLE-HANDED.) I also think it's important to remember the novel tells a parallel story too: the saga of French Sgt. Godinot and his platoon, who are killed off one-by-one during their encounters with Dodd and Portuguese guerrillas. Their hair-raising experiences as members of an occupying army in a land swarming with ferocious irregulars gave me pause about the American efforts in Vietnam when I first read RIFLEMAN DODD back in the 1960s (and causes similar thoughts about our current occupation in Iraq; sure hope I'm wrong about that). Forester's style depends a lot on understatement, and it pays off in the final pages. Having returned at last to his unit at the end, Dodd gazes at guerrilla campfires in the hills, and Forester deadpans that in one of them the guerrillas are burning Sgt. Godinot to death. There's also a paragraph that gives a poignant flash of the rifleman's later life, describing him as a "querulous, bald-headed old boozer" sitting by the stove in drunken old age, who can never quite tell his adventures in a coherent way. It's very touching, and that paragraph by itself is almost worth the price. RIFLEMAN DODD is a great, understated adventure book.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Yours is Not to Wonder Why . . . An Explanation of Duty,
By A Customer
This review is from: Rifleman Dodd (Hardcover)
I picked this up in the Marine Corps Association bookstore, and a few chapters into it I understood why the Marines placed it on the Commandant's Reading List. Rifleman Dodd is an exemplary soldier: cut off from his regiment, surrounded by the enemy in a foreign land whose language, people and customs he knows not, Dodd merely soldiers on, seeking to return to his unit and in doing so, wreak as much havoc on the enemy as possible.In reading this book, you get a sense of what profesisonalism is in the military from the bottom-up. Moreoever, the book conveys to the reader the benefits of a professional military as opposed to a conscript force in terms of morale and training. Also, Forester relates some of the nastiness for which the Peninsular Campaign was infamous. Dodd takes up with a bunch of Portugese irregulars, and the attrocities which one finds in history books committed by the locals and the French are often repeated in the course of the novel, Rifleman Dodd. Rifleman Dodd brings out many themese and issues one often has in discussions of a professional military in the course of its flowing, exciting narrative.
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