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Title: The Red Badge of Courage

Author: Stephen Crane

Narrator: Richard Thomas

Format: Abridged

Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-22-17

Publisher: Phoenix Books

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Classics, American Literature

Publisher's Summary:

First published in 1895, Crane's novel of the Civil War was written entirely from newspaper accounts and research, as Crane himself never went to war. Nevertheless, this powerful psychological study of a young soldier's struggle with the internal and external horrors that war unleashes will strike listeners with its undeniable realism and with its masterful description of the moment-by-moment eruption of emotions felt by men under fire.

Members Reviews:

I felt like I was at war

How would I behave and feel if thrust into battle? Easy to declare that one is patriotic and in agreement with a cause, to get in line and sign up, but how about the day in and day out part of battle? The waiting, the social intercourse with fellow fighters, the gear, following without question a commander, could I do that? How does the average 19-23 year old feel in those situations? This book conjures up thoughts, feelings, emotions that put you on the front line. Well written and a good story, the killer combo.

A Reflection Upon Man's Emotions During Battle

This is not a book about a specific person, or about a specific battle. Our protagonist isn't even given a name, age or home, save during his musings back to when he quit seminary school (indicating probably about 18 years old, and from the Northeast), and bade farewell to his mother, who called him Henry. We meet "the youth", as he's called throughout, while he's waiting to be sent to battle for the first time. The youth must have been a Northern soldier, and the battle must have been in Virginia; other than that, this book is more generic with regard to events, and about emotions, changes in soldiers, and their reactions to events.

Halfway through this book: "The youth took note of a remarkable change in his comrade since those days of camp life upon the river bank. He seemed no more to be continually regarding the proportions of his personal prowess. He was not furious at small words that pricked his conceits. He was no more a loud young soldier. There was about him now a fine reliance...."

Toward the end of the battle: "...The lieutenant, also, was unscathed in his position at the rear. He had continued to curse, but it was not with the air of a man who was using his last box of oaths..."

At the end of the book: "A specter of reproach came to him. There loomed the dogging memory of the tattered soldier - he who, gored by bullets and faint for blood, had fretted concerning an imagined wound in another; he who had loaned his last of strength and intellect for the tall soldier; he who, blind with weariness and pain, had been deserted in the field..."

A powerful reflection upon the changing of a man during the course of a battle. It's slow reading, because it does warrant reflection.

An absolute, all-time classic - a haunting, harrowing ...

An absolute, all-time classic - a haunting, harrowing account of war, by a writer who never served in the military, never heard a shot fired in anger. The simplicity and clarity of Crane's plot and writing style make this one of the most mesmerizing, haunting accounts of war imaginable. There is a reason this book is still read more than a century after it was written, a century and a half since the war was fought that is its subject.