Karl Marlantes Boeken

A big, powerful saga of men in combat, written over the course of thirty-five years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran. Intense, powerful, and compelling, 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. Written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, 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. A graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Karl Marlantes served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. This is his first novel. He lives in rural Washington State.

A stunningly expansive family saga of anguish, reinvention and courage from the bestselling author of Matterhorn.

In 1968, at 22, Karl Marlantes left his Oxford scholarship to serve in the US Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. The experience over thirteen months in the jungles of Southeast Asia profoundly impacted him, revealing the chaos of a conflict defined only by kill ratios and body counts. Returning home adorned with medals, he found the aftermath even more challenging. It took him four decades to confront his experiences, during which he created a fictionalized account of his war in MATTERHORN, recognized as a definitive Vietnam novel. WHAT IT IS LIKE TO GO TO WAR revisits Vietnam without the fictional lens, presenting the hard-earned truths that informed MATTERHORN. This work serves as an exorcism of Marlantes's combat experiences, a confession, and a philosophical guide for those about to face war. It offers a candid exploration of what it means to be a soldier, confront death, and take a life. Through this unflinching narrative, Marlantes provides insight into the profound complexities and emotional toll of war, revealing the stark realities that soldiers endure both on the battlefield and after they return home.

"Helsinki, 1947. Finland teeters between the Soviet Union and the West. Everyone is being watched. A wrong look or a wrong word could end in catastrophe. Natalya Bobrova, from Russia, and Louise Koski, from the United States, are young wives of their country's military attachâes. When they meet at an embassy party, their husbands, Arnie and Mikhail, both world-class skiers, drunkenly challenge each other to a friendly-but secret-cross-country wilderness race. Louise is delighted, but Natalya is worried. Stalin and Beria's secret police rule with unforgiving brutality. If news of the race gets out and Mikhail loses, Natalya knows it would mean his death, her imprisonment, and the loss of her two children. Meanwhile, Louise, who is childless, uses the race as an opportunity to raise money for a local orphanage, naive to the danger it will bring to Natalya and her family. Too late to stop Louise's scheme, a horrified Natalya watches as news of the race spreads across the globe as newspapers and politicians spin it as a symbolic battle: freedom versus communism. Desperate to undo her mistake, Louise must reach Arnie to tell him to throw the race and save Mikhail-but how? The two racers are in a world of their own, unreachable in Finland's arctic wilderness."--