By: Robert Stone Publisher: Mariner Books Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Mariner Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 352 Publication Date: April 02, 1997
Product Description: In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers - and the price of survival was dangerously high.
Amazon.com: Like Michael Herr's Dispatches, Robert Stone's National Book Award-winning novel Dog Soldiers trades on a hallucinatory vision of Vietnam as a place in which all honor and morality are ceded to the mere business of survival -- and, better, survival with personal profit. "This is the place where everybody finds out who they are," says the novel's protagonist, the journalist Converse, to which his friend and partner in crime Ray Hicks replies, "What a bummer for the gooks." Converse convinces Hicks to smuggle a shipment of heroin back to the United States, renegade CIA agents pop up, and all hell breaks loose in this beautifully written, dark study of the soul in anguish.
Great Chase! I remember this book with great fondness. Great characters and a break-neck plot. Good for escape, but also has a message from a terrific writer.
my favorite book by a great american author I am a fan of robert stone, and this is my favorite book by him.
First, having served as a correspondent in Vietnam and as someone who was immersed in 60s counterculture, he brings an authenticity to the story. The characters and setting ring true.
Secondly, for me this is his most successful integration of the philosophical/ideas novel with adrenaline-powered storytelling. It is a page-turner with a brain, with echoes of hemmingway and joseph conrad.
his central protagonist, hicks, is my favorite of all stone's anti-heroes. his novels never contain a "perfect" hero but rather protagonists doing the best they can in the world they inhabit and with the imperfect tools they are born with. Hicks is a fascinating though flawed character.
Michael Herr meets Jim Thompson I read this novel after Richard Ford mentioned that Robert Stone was one of his favorite authors, someone who in his mind best deserves the accolade of "getting Vietnam right." Or at least, I thought he said something like that.
Stone is again pretty famous because he has come out with a memoir of his time in the counterculture -- Prime Green -- and that certainly colored my time with this novel.
Stone offers a lot of story in this novel. This is no aching reflection. It is not about peering through drawn shades on to a street in Vietnam, like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. It is a thrill ride of a drug deal gone horribly wrong.
I suppose that desperation opens well into the moral ambiguities where these characters live. In each of the three main characters -- Ray Hicks, John Converse, and Marge Converse -- their lives have taken a break from normalcy. In Vietnam, Converse runs with a crowd of two faced brothel owners and press corps types. Back in the states, its more of the same: everyone is grifting -- from the police officers to the hippie commune leaders.
My favorite part of this book was the description of the odd stories that Converse wrote while working for his father in law at a second rate tabloid newspaper. "Hungry Skydiver Eats Woman," was a title, I think: that makes sense, in a way, because before he was famous, Stone made a living covering wrestling for local newspapers.
I am glad I read this book. It seems like it was an important story when it came out. I feel glad to have stumbled upon it. I thought I was going to get something historical, and it turned out to be a yarn and a half.
Thanks, Jorn! I read about this book on Jorn Barger's website, in the section in which he recommends books. This book is on a par with Conrad and Hemingway. Intensity of mood meshes with character development and descriptions of people, actions, places, weather on a particular day, crowds in different countries, literary allusions. There are a few pages on which a little jargon is used: most English-speakers who grew up in an English-speaking country and don't live in a cave will "get" them. A few were even over my head, and I'm not only a native English speaker but a native Californian, who grew up in the 70s drug culture, so I should get all of them (there are about three or four things I didn't understand). But even if you don't know what place June is referring to when she says "P.V" (it's Puerto Vallarta), these few phrases shouldn't detract from your enjoyment of one of the greatest American novels. IMnotatallHO, this book beats anything I have read by David Foster Wallace, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Don DeLillo, or anyone in the McSweeney's crowd.
DON'T TAKE HEED OF ANY REVIEWS OF THIS BOOK WRITTEN BY DISGRUNTLED IOWAN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS WHO HAD TO WRITE A REVIEW OF IT FOR A CLASS.
[Oh yeah: why I gave it one star: I like to give my reviews one star, because then discerning people will read them. I myself usually avoid reading five-star reviews as they are almost always mindless gushing - give me some juicy, bitchy opinionated ranting over simpering tepid praise any day!
On the Dveej-o-meter, Dog Soldiers gets a 9.6 out of 10.]
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