Certainly better than A Higher Call and Spearhead, but Makos still works too hard to make a single event into a full-length book. As other reviewers have said, it's a poor decision on his part to replace military & nautical terms with civilian ones. The writing style is pretty simplistic....like young teens are the audience he was writing for instead of adults. I found it odd that Hudner was the one to try to rescue Brown, because if the book is accurate, they really didn't have much of a connection prior to that. They were squadron mates, sure, but not roommates, rarely flew together as leader & wingman, didn't spend much time outside the squadron together. But Makos never works to uncover this disconnect. I also found it odd that when the chopper comes to pick up the 2 downed aviators, Hudner and the chopper pilot are concerned that Brown is dying, but nobody bothers to check for a pulse? "Oh, his head is down and he's not responding, he must be dead." Again - seems like the type of broad overview writing that would appeal to young teens. If I don't read any more Adam Makos, that'll be fine. ( )

The battle portion of the book is interesting from a historical perspective, but the first two-thirds of the book do a very poor job of developing a bond between Tom and Jesse. The writing is repetitive and doesn't really fit the language and actions of soldiers. ( )

Story of U.S. Navy’s most famous aviation duo, Lieutenant Tom Hudner and Ensign JesseBrown, and the Marines they fought to defend. Slow moving. Short, choppy sentences interrupt the flow. Narrative jumps from characters. ( )

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed reading it. The Korean War does seem to be a "forgotten " war but this book certainly did a good job of telling a small part of it.

I think that some of the most interesting passages were when the author described the scenery from the pilots' vantage points. For instance there's a story told where the enemy on the ground would be dressed in white then would curl into a ball when the planes flew over, looking like rocks or snow balls below.

It was that attention to detail that I found compelling. At any rate this is a fascinating snapshot of a group of men who gave meaning to friendship and duty ( )

I started this one with the audiobook which I borrowed from my library. For those of you who complain about audios that are performed, this is the audiobook for you. Hoffman's narration was technical and dry with zero emoting at all. It was incredibly difficult for me to listen to. I found my mind often wondering and having to rewind several times, and even then I couldn't keep my attention on the story for very long.

I got to about 75% and gave up, switching over to the paperback. I spent most of yesterday skim-reading the first 340 pages to pick up all the stuff I missed while listening, and finished up the last few chapters last night and this morning and looked at the various photos and maps that the audio obviously doesn't have. The writing flowed much better once I was reading it.

The Korean War is known as the Forgotten War, or as the veterans of that war call it, the Forgotten Victory. Many of them were already veterans from WWII, and many others had been too young to fight in WWII but were now fighting in this war. I didn't know much about the Korean War before going into this, so it was interesting to learn more about it, what forces were involved, what the stakes were and all that.

This war also started just a few years after Pres. Truman desegregated the military, but there was still Jim Crow in the south, and segregation laws throughout much of the US, including D.C. and California. The book gives some accounts of the early lives of Tom Hudner, a white man from a wealthy New England family, and Jesse Brown, the navy's first black officer, from a poor sharecropper family in Mississippi. They would become friends once they both got assigned to the U.S.S. Leyte. It also focuses on a number of the other pilots in their squadron, and how they all bonded in their first year together.

Once the book gets to North Korea and the battles that took place there in the first year of the war, up to the battle of Chosin, it includes accounts of the Marines that the pilots of Squadron 32 helped to defend. There's also an account about a third of the way into the book of their stay in Cannes where many of them met a young Elizabeth Taylor, and I felt that part was rather meandering and didn't really amount to much.

Makos doesn't stray into dramatics. He reports the facts and relays them in an approachable manner. He interviewed many of the men he portrays here, as well as their friends and family, and even went to North Korea to interview veterans there when Hudner returned there years later, which is true dedication. The writing is simple but not unmoving when it needs to be. ( )