Nobody Comes Back: A Novel of the Battle of the Bulge

The tempo clips along from the first to the last page. This book is hard to put down, and a treat to pick up again. The writing is tight and well paced. The crisp economy of the writing reminds me of Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea". Donn Pearce is very good at his craft. Those with a military interest will not be disappointed with the accuracy of the detail. The details are not overdone but sufficient to maintain the authenticity of the tale and keep the reader firmly in the moment. An excellent read and very well written. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the genre, and those who simply appreciate a story well told.

I've got to admit, at first I had my doubts, expecting "Cool Hand Luke" goes to war. I was wrong. I couldn't put it down. My only minor complaint would be the extreme cynicism of the protagonist (shades of Holden in "Catcher In the Rye") -- but it fits him perfectly once you learn his back story. The characterization and awesome action scenes kept me reading. You WILL feel for the protagonist. I must note that in three trips to the Ardennes battlefields, Pearce accurately captures the terrain, weather and villages as few authors have. He had done his homework. Expect a highly personal story that doesn't try to give the reader the big historical picture. Pearce never changes the point of view character. And in this case that works quite well. Yet it is very historically accurate. Read this book, but be sure you have time when you pick it up, because you're not going to want to put it down. Nobody Comes Back can indeed be favorable compared to Stephen Crane's, "The Red Badge of Courage." And that's not publisher's hype, it's the truth.

Like his classic debut, "Cool Hand Luke," Donn Pearce bases this harrowing narrative on his own experience. In this novel, we follow Toby Parker, a 16 year-old who lied about his age to get into the Army and his experiences during the last great German attack in the west in December 1944. Newsweek hailed the book's realism and said that it's action sequences resembled those of "Saving Private Ryan." I don't like comparing two different stories (especially when they're from two different mediums), but I will say this; after a lengthy absence it's nice to see the return of an old master storyteller. Pearce's book rumbles along like a Sherman tank on a mission. He blows readers away with taut characterization, and a smooth flowing prose. The battle scenes are some of the best I have read and at a length of barely over 250 pages, I think Pearce manages to say more in this spare little book than Norman Mailer did in the 600 plus pages of the vastly overrated "Naked and the Dead." I think time will place this book near the top of great American novels about World War II. The only complaint I can think of and this has nothing to do with the novel itself, but it's with the publisher, Forge. The book's cover shows a "soldier" dashing through a wasted landscape. What's particularly aggravating here is that the "soldier" was in fact, PFC Isen of the 5th Marine Regiment while he was on Okinawa. Given the endless archives of photographs taken of American troops in the Bulge, how could somebody make so stupid a mistake? Heck, I'll take that person's job and do it right. So hopefully in future printings, perhaps Forge will change the photo and put the picture of a dogface in the Ardennes on the cover. Still, a great book. 5 stars.

For those that like or enjoy novels of battle or war, this one will most certainly fill the bill. It is quite tempting to compare this work with Red Badge of Courage, and I do suppose that it may, in some ways, be a fare comparison. I personally prefer RBC over this work, but rather I tried to read Nobody Comes Back as a work that should and can stand alone on it's own merits...different war, different circumstances, different attitudes. Mr. Pearce has done a nice job of story telling here. For my personal taste, I enjoyed and appreciated the author's obvious knowledge of the weapons used during this time period. I thought this added much to the story. The author in no way glorifies war, but rather attempts to weave a very satisfactory story with the realities of a horrible situation a young boy finds himself in. The author does this quite well . The author is quite good with descriptive details. The story moves fast and you do gain an understanding of the primary character. I am not so sure, as the publisher trumpets it, that this will become an all time war classic, but I certainly recommend it as a fine read and one you will probably want to add to your collection. I do not normally recommend "fiction" to be added to a collection of histories of war, but this is an exception as the author's research is certainly as good as some of the recent historians have accomplished. All in all, recommend this one highly.

Despite the subtitle of this book (A Novel of the Battle of the Bulge) this narration transcends any specific battle or any specific war and focuses on the internal skirmishes of its young protagonist. Donn Pearce (who also wrote Cool Hand Luke) is a miniaturist, a seeker of the internal truth, the discoverer of some of the psychological gears, knobs, or buttons that propel an individual to behave in extraordinary, or peculiar, or mad, or incandescent ways. NOBODY COMES BACK is the story of Toby Parker, a boy of sixteen who has never known normalcy. As a kid his high IQ soon made him aware of the marginality of the family he had been born into. They functioned at the edges of society, teetering between sanity and madness, between poverty and indigence; they were people who lacked the buffers that might have protected them against, or even allowed them to postpone for a few days, the inevitable consequences of their own follies. A master at avoidance, Toby came to the Army with his own agenda and keenly developed skills at navigating through turbulence and danger. Pearce knits together the two stories about Toby Parker (pre-war and wartime) by the device of letting the exhausted soldier regress in dreams and memories to his previous life. This creates a contrast and a counterpoint to the grotesque brutality of the war itself. He takes the inadequate training he has been given to fight a war in stride, for his background has prepared him to understand (and therefore stand up to) not only the crazy ways of the US Army but the similarly deranged behavior of the Germans. This book will bring great pleasure to the slow reader able to savor the intricate details set forth by the author about how a human being can hold up despite unbearable internal and external abuse. Probably a classic.