Cheap The Alamo (Book) (Frank Thompson) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Alamo

A Classic
Frank Thompson does a great job of depicting the sadness and triumph of the real battle in San Antonio. This is a marvelous movie tie-in. Thompson does an astounding job of creating the characters, especially Crockett, Bowie, and Travis. He also does a good job showing Sam Houston, a man trying to decide between his destiny as a general of war, or a life with his Cherokee Indian wife, Talihina. This is a great book, and I highly recommend reading it.

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Plodding Novelization of the movie; NOT the illus. companion
First, a word of clarification: Amazon's listings appear to be hopelessly scrambled for books by Frank Thompson with the word "Alamo" in them. I only found this listing -- for the mass-market paperback novelization of the screenplay to the film "The Alamo" -- by a link to a wholly different book of nearly the same title ("The Alamo: The Illustrated Story of the Epic Film"), which is itself also reviewed here along with reviews of the novel. On another occasion, I located this book via a link from a hardback book by the same author of the same title that is in fact an oversize hardback non-fiction book dealing with the historical Alamo, a book that predates both the 2004 movie and its tie-in books. I had to buy this book at a brick-and-mortar bookstore, in fact, due to my being unable to find it on Amazon with a normal "Search." It is all very confusing and I wonder how many customers are unablke to order the book they really want? The movie tie-in illustrated book is oversize, full of color photos from the film, and sold in hardback and paperback formats; the nbon-fiction hardback deals with the historical Alamo and predates the release of the 2004 movie. THIS book is a novelization of the film, is sold in mass-market paperback only, and is about 370 pages long, considerably more pages than the illustrated movie companion book OR non-fiction book. Be sure you know what you're ordering!

That said, I didn't care for this treatment very much. It has been a long, hard slog to force myself to read through it all (as an Alamo completist, I feel I should do this at least once). Partly this is due to the screenplay itself, forming the crux of this novelization, being surprisingly flat on the printed page (and sometimes equally so onscreen). But mainly it is due, I feel, to Thompson's shortcomings as a writer of fiction. His invented scenes (why the publishers felt the need to pad this book into its current bloated length is a mystery to me) are labored and flat, his characters stock types, his dialogue forced. There is an awkward connect with the screenplay sequences, and there is little to no literary style to Thompson's lifeless prose. It is a writing-by-the-numbers approach, devoid of emotion and as clunky as an Edsel. And something that never failed to take me out of whatever mood had been established was the frequent appearance of Thompson's in-jokey name-droppings of members of the Alamo Society or other Alamo experts and writers as bit characters. Maybe outsiders will not catch wise, but it struck me as inherently amaturish and distracting.

With the film tanking badly, if undeservedly, this title will probably soon disappear, but it won't be any great loss except to collectors of Alamo memorabilia. (...)

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Great book based on the movie
Frank Thompson has released another excellent Alamo book. The Alamo is the novelization of the script by Leslie Boneham and John Lee Hancock. If you enjoyed the movie or are just looking to find out more information about Texas in the 1830's, this is the book for you. The book tells the story of the months leading up to the Texas Revolution, the siege and battle of the Alamo, followed by the Runaway Scrape and the battle of San Jacinto. Thompson uses the script very well, and at the same time adds his own little pieces about the characters and background settings of the time. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the movie as well as both books by Mr. Thompson and the soundtrack by Carter Burwell. For an excellent read that places you directly in the Alamo, check out this novel!