Gates of Fire

Gates of Fire
by Steven Pressfield

Gates of Fire
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Book Summary Information

Author: Steven Pressfield
Reader: Derek Jacobi
Edition: Audio Cassette
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
Published: 1998-10-20
ISBN: 0553525859
Publisher: Random House Audio
Accessories:

Book Reviews of Gates of Fire

Book Review: Very Nice
Summary: 5 Stars

I haven't read hundreds of books (I'm only twenty one) but for what it's worth this is without a doubt my favorite one. I was enveloped right from the start, which is important to me. I have always loved history and Pressfield teaches much while still keeping an exciting story. Often my biggest complaint with books is that the author is too descriptive; not so here. I like how Pressfield describes the characters in terms of demeanor and status and personality rather than creating an image of everyone's nose. Anywho, i love this book and bought another pressfield (Killing Rommel) because of it.

Summary of Gates of Fire

In 480 B.C., an invading, two-million strong, Persian army came to the mountain pass of Thermopylae in eastern Greece. Led by King Xerxes, they were met by the finest three hundred Spartan warriors where the rocky confines were so narrow that the Persian multitudes and their cavalry would be at least partially neutralized. Here, the Greek loyalists hoped, the elite force could hold off, at least for a short while, the invading millions.

With an uncanny ability to preserve the ancient feel of the Homeric voice while bringing the narrative into the twentieth century, Steven Pressfield has crafted a completely absorbing and dramatic epic of battle and the Spartan way of life and death.
Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.

Thus reads an ancient stone at Thermopylae in northern Greece, the site of one of the world's greatest battles for freedom. Here, in 480 B.C., on a narrow mountain pass above the crystalline Aegean, 300 Spartan knights and their allies faced the massive forces of Xerxes, King of Persia. From the start, there was no question but that the Spartans would perish. In Gates of Fire, however, Steven Pressfield makes their courageous defense--and eventual extinction--unbearably suspenseful.

In the tradition of Mary Renault, this historical novel unfolds in flashback. Xeo, the sole Spartan survivor of Thermopylae, has been captured by the Persians, and Xerxes himself presses his young captive to reveal how his tiny cohort kept more than 100,000 Persians at bay for a week. Xeo, however, begins at the beginning, when his childhood home in northern Greece was overrun and he escaped to Sparta. There he is drafted into the elite Spartan guard and rigorously schooled in the art of war--an education brutal enough to destroy half the students, but (oddly enough) not without humor: "The more miserable the conditions, the more convulsing the jokes became, or at least that's how it seems," Xeo recalls. His companions in arms are Alexandros, a gentle boy who turns out to be the most courageous of all, and Rooster, an angry, half-Messenian youth.

Pressfield's descriptions of war are breathtaking in their immediacy. They are also meticulously assembled out of physical detail and crisp, uncluttered metaphor:

The forerank of the enemy collapsed immediately as the first shock hit it; the body-length shields seemed to implode rearward, their anchoring spikes rooted slinging from the earth like tent pins in a gale. The forerank archers were literally bowled off their feet, their wall-like shields caving in upon them like fortress redoubts under the assault of the ram.... The valor of the individual Medes was beyond question, but their light hacking blades were harmless as toys; against the massed wall of Spartan armor, they might as well have been defending themselves with reeds or fennel stalks.
Alas, even this human barrier was bound to collapse, as we knew all along it would. "War is work, not mystery," Xeo laments. But Pressfield's epic seems to make the opposite argument: courage on this scale is not merely inspiring but ultimately mysterious. --Marianne Painter

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