FREEDOM AND JUSTICE -- AMERICAN STYLE 1632 And in northern Germany things couldn't get much worse. Famine. Disease. Religous war laying waste the cities. Only the aristocrats remained relatively unscathed; for the peasants, death was a mercy. 2000 Things are going OK in Grantville, West Virginia, and everybody attending the wedding of Mike Stearn's sister (including the entire local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, which Mike leads) is having a good time. THEN, EVERYTHING CHANGED.... When the dust settles, Mike leads a group of armed miners to find out what happened and finds the road into town is cut, as with a sword. On the other side, a scene out of Hell: a man nailed to a farmhouse door, his wife and daughter attacked by men in steel vests. Faced with this, Mike and his friends don't have to ask who to shoot. At that moment Freedom and Justice, American style, are introduced to the middle of the Thirty Years' War.
Reviews
When a cosmic accident transports a West Virginia community back in time and space to 17th-century Thuringia, the citizens of Grantville find themselves thrust into the midst of the bloody and savage conflict that history books would call the Thirty Years War. Surrounded by warring armies and burdened by the prospect of diminishing resources, Grantville residents, under the leadership of a council that includes a union leader, a doctor, and a teacher, proceed to turn their new world upside down, beginning the American Revolution a century and a half before its time. Flint (Mother of Demons) convincingly re-creates the military and political tenor of the times in this imaginative and unabashedly positive approach to alternative history. A solid choice for fantasy collections. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
"...convincing historical detail ... entertaining ... it's hard not to cheer". -- Starlog
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Reviews
3.0
out of 5 based on
1
reviews.
– Customer review on 07/06/2007
1632 is possibly Eric Flint's most overtly American work.
Pro-unionisation, pro-`The American Way' and casting a variety of historical characters as convenient baddies, this book is also surprisingly readable.
I must admit, as a non-American myself sometimes I was lost about what the characters were talking about, but the general premise is that an all-American mining town is transported back in time to the time period of the thirty-year war, where they proceed to build an American style utopia amongst universal human suffering. Yeah, you can probably tell I'm a bit cynical. However, The Plot is there (if tenuously for a while), and the minor sub-plots are really cool (Esp the one with the slightly amoral German girl who marries some sort of punk biker.) Overall I don't rate its chances of being a big-seller outside the US.
Some of the relationships seem a litte... 'love at first sight, lets get them married and get on with the story'. In fact all of of the relationships are like that. But whatever, it's a legitimate tactic.
I did like the book however - mostly for its female characters. The guys all blurred into one blond American mass after a while, but the girls were all as different as apples and oranges. Possibly not being American was a big downside for me, because a lot of the talk is political, and about what it means to be an American.
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